Le Journal

Experts say Sydney Water should better treat wastewater before sending it offshore at Malabar, Bondi and North Head. The corporation disagreesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastIn the first half of the 1900s, the mantra “the solution to pollution is dilution” ruled. The idea was that harmful chemicals and pollutants could be dealt with by spreading them out in the environment.Now, that approach is derided as outdated and, often, dangerous. Continue reading...

These are the federal agencies detaining people across the US – mostly, but not all, under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland SecurityWhen the Trump administration ordered a surge of armed federal immigration enforcement personnel on to the streets of Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security declared it the largest operation in its history and the liberal midwestern city became Donald Trump’s latest chosen hotspot.Such escalations mark the US president’s agenda of mass arrests and deportations from the US interior. The highest-profile efforts involve officers from multiple agencies rushing to prominent Democratic-led US cities, against local leaders’ wishes. But coast to coast, federal officers have been raiding homes, businesses, commercial parking lots – even schools, hospitals and courthouses. The efforts have delighted the president’s hardcore Make America Great Again voter base, but are also tearing families apart and spreading fear and even death on the streets and in detention. Continue reading...

Experts call for tighter regulation as GPS tracking reveals how people’s behaviour affects the lives of some of the world’s largest birdsMany people look up to admire the silhouette of raptors, some of the planet’s largest birds, soaring through seemingly empty skies. But increasingly, research shows us that this fascination runs both ways. From high above, these birds are watching us too.Thanks to the development of tiny GPS tracking devices attached to their bodies, researchers are getting millions of data points on the day-to-day lives of these apex predators of the skies, giving us greater insight into where they hunt and rest, and how they die. Continue reading...

Despite much soul-searching over UK’s inability to build infrastructure, two sections of HS2 under Chilterns are being hailed for their engineeringSeventy metres down, in deep incognito beneath a disguised ventilation shaft in the Chilterns countryside, lies HS2’s buried treasure: two 10-mile tunnels, built to avoid an area of outstanding natural beauty, eerily spectacular in gleaming concrete.They are, laments a staffer on the high-speed railway scheme, what all of the route should look like by now: pristine, fully constructed, and just waiting for a railway to run through them. Continue reading...

Aid groups say rise of far-right rhetoric in politics has fed into intimidation, vandalism and hate graffiti around migrant campsNot far from a camp in Dunkirk where hundreds of asylum seekers sleep, hoping to cross the Channel to the UK, are some chilling pieces of graffiti. There is a hangman’s noose with a figure dangling next to the word “migrant” and, close by, another daubing: a Jewish Star of David painted in black surrounded by red swastikas.Utopia 56, a French group supporting migrants in northern France, posted the image on X on Christmas Day with the comment: “This is what comes from normalising the extreme right’s rhetoric, a visible, unapologetic, unabashed hatred.” Continue reading...