Exclusive: Company has failed to tackle serious safety concerns or upgrade vital IT systems, Guardian investigation reveals
Floods, explosions, asbestos: Thames faces problems on all fronts
Thames Water has £23bn of assets that are in urgent need of repair and the supply of water to its 16 million customers is “on a knife-edge”, a Guardian investigation can reveal.
Britain’s biggest water company has failed to tackle adequately serious safety concerns, has not upgraded essential IT systems and has tolerated a culture of intimidation among staff, according to insiders and an analysis of documents.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/17/2024 - 09:01
Minor party’s offer, which includes ban on native-forest logging, represents its second concession on stalled legislation in less than a week
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The Greens have dropped their demand for a climate trigger to be incorporated in the government’s stalled Nature Positive legislation, indicating they are now prepared to pass the bills in return for a Australia-wide ban on native-forest logging alone.
The party has previously refused to support Labor’s legislation, insisting that both a climate trigger and forest-logging ban must be included.
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11/17/2024 - 07:56
Jochen Flasbarth called on Cop29 delegates to press on as world faces increasing crises and drop in solidarity
Governments meeting to forge a global settlement on climate finance must get over their differences this week and come to a deal – because if talks carry on until next year they stand little chance with Donald Trump in the White House, the German development minister has said.
Jochen Flasbarth, one of the most influential ministers at the UN Cop29 summit, said that if the final days of the summit did not produce a breakthrough countries would face a much tougher prospect.
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11/17/2024 - 07:53
Union leader says anger is unprecedented, but does not condone any plan to stop food reaching supermarkets
The president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said that farmers in England and Wales feel “betrayed” by changes to inheritance tax rules, while saying his organisation does not condone mooted plans to stop food reaching supermarket shelves.
Tom Bradshaw, the NFU president, said anger among farmers about the changes announced in last month’s budget over inheritance tax and farms was unprecedented, and that he understood why many members wanted to take action.
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11/17/2024 - 06:34
Brown bears, introduced into Trentino province 20 years ago, have begun to clash with the local human population
Franca Gherardini used to cherish the sublime views from her home in Caldes, a village surrounded by forests on the slopes of the Brenta Dolomites in northern Italy’s Trentino province.
But now she tries to shut out the scene as much as possible, rolling down the window canopy in the morning to avoid looking towards the area where her son, Andrea Papi, 26, was killed by a bear.
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11/17/2024 - 03:35
The grim negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, have shown the need for reform of the UN annual global climate talks
‘Global emissions continue to increase, carbon sinks are being degraded and we can no longer exclude the possibility of surpassing 2.9C of warming by 2100.” It is a bleak assessment of our planet’s future and could have been made by just about any environmental organisation on Earth.
In fact, they are the views of an international group of climate experts that highlight, in sharp detail, the manifest failings of the UN’s annual Cop climate summits, whose 29th iteration is now being staged in Baku, Azerbaijan. These talks, they said last week, are no longer fit for purpose and need an urgent overhaul.
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11/17/2024 - 03:00
New data reveals an extra 5,000 tonnes of waste is sent to landfill or incineration from November to March
Plastic bottles are reviled for polluting the oceans, leaching chemicals into drinks and being a source of microplastics in the human body.
They even cause problems with recycling. When plastic bottles are mixed with cardboard in recycling bins, in the wet winter months the sodden cardboard wraps around the plastic bottles and trays, causing havoc at recycling plants.
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11/17/2024 - 03:00
Piles of loo paper, a years worth of tinned goods and snake-proof boots. No wonder prepping has become a lifestyle choice
Prepping – I’m coming round to it. I’ve had Prepare, the old government website that Oliver Dowden launched this spring, open on my laptop in a quivering tab for a while now, and this week I’ve been dipping in every now and then to remind myself of “how to prepare for an emergency”. How many bottles of water we may need, tweezers, a sage reminder about the fact of tinned meat.
I’ve dabbled in prepping before, without really realising what I was doing. A fear in the early 2000s that Rimmel might stop making my favourite eyeliner led to me dashing to Boots to buy five. Which is fairly normal, I think? On the spectrum of normal? Sensible probably, when so many, as you’ll know, have brushes too fine or ink that disappears in rain. In the grip of lockdown, as supermarket deliveries were increasingly scarce, when I was blessed with a Tesco slot I would focus not on toilet paper or flour, but on treats. I’d stockpile the good biscuits, and, in my naivety, Biscoff spread. I remember there were very large gift bars of Galaxy chocolate on offer for a while, bars the size of a small dinghy which I would buy in bulk, nibbling away at the corners like a parasite. That was when we started decanting our pulses. Still, beside the microwave sits a proud wall of oversized Tupperware, carefully labelled in my six-year-old daughter’s handwriting: “spageti”, “green lenttles”, “ryce”. It felt good. I felt prepared, but for what, was unclear.
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11/17/2024 - 02:00
Prices and rents will fall under Rachel Reeves’ plans, enabling a younger generation with new ideas to enter the field
One of the baleful dimensions of our times is the way that the conversation about what constitutes the good society is framed by the rich and their interests. A conception of the common good withers; instead it is replaced by the existential importance of private wealth, private interests and private ownership to societal health. Nowhere is this more exposed than in the debate over taxation, and in particular the taxation of inherited wealth – as the debate over the past fortnight has dramatised.
Half a million people die every year. Under the reforms to inheritance tax relief on agricultural land proposed in the budget, about 500 individuals who inherit land worth more than £2m (£3m if they were married to the deceased) will join the rest of society and have inheritance tax levied on their bequest – albeit at half the rate, with an enlarged exemption and 10 years to pay it, concessions not made to the rest of us. How fortunate and privileged are they?
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11/13/2024 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 13 November 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00093-3
The Dubai Ocean Declaration is the latest international call to expand ocean observation worldwide. We argue that there needs to be a committed effort to establish governance systems to guide data collection designed around equity, to ensure ocean data collection contributes to sustainable development. Ocean science has historically been led by the Global North, neglecting the priorities and leadership of the Global South, and limiting the relevance of ocean science for global sustainability.
