Tag: SB001

The tragedy has naturally raised questions about Indonesia’s air safety standards. Over the past decade the nation has done much to improve them. But more still remains to be done. As commercial aviation recovers from its COVID stall, regulators will need to focus on aviation safety to ensure the progress ...

The Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern communities that rely heavily on seafood and ...

By accident or design, Australia has appeared to be in the front line of Western criticism of Beijing — and has been subjected to a growing list of export restrictions in return.

The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification.

Five days after supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the Capitol building, the House of Representatives introduced a single article of impeachment against the president.

The world watched with a sense of dread in 2018 as Cape Town, South Africa, counted down the days until the city would run out of water. The region’s surface reservoirs were going dry amid its worst drought on record, and the public countdown was a plea for help.

It hasn’t been the start to 2021 many of us wanted. In the past three weeks Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales have dealt with fresh COVID outbreaks, but it’s worth remembering each have faced unique challenges, and tackled them in different ways.

In developing countries, each person produces, on average, six litres of toilet wastewater each day. Based on the number of people who don’t have access to safe sanitation, that equates to nearly 14 billion litres of untreated faecally contaminated wastewater created each day. That’s the same as 5,600 Olympic-sized swimming ...

Colourful mining magnate Clive Palmer’s political ambitions appear to be in tatters. But what of his multibillion-dollar legal ambitions?

The global COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying, with more infectious variants of the virus, and more rapid spread, especially in countries such as the US and UK. This deterioration has meant a higher number of infected returnees arriving at New Zealand’s MIQ facilities — with 31 new cases in a recent ...

Biden’s cabinet choices have clearly been made with the aim of fulfilling his campaign promise of restoring competence and stability to Washington. He has prioritised individuals who have solid experience and credentials, as well as those with whom he has strong working relationships.

A “sudden stratospheric warming” event took place in early January 2021, according to the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service. These events are some of the most extreme of atmospheric phenomena, and I study them as part of my academic research.

The attack on the Capitol exposed, in stark terms, the dangers of disinformation in the digital age. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which certain elements of America’s free speech tradition may no longer be fit for purpose.

Though we think of commuting as a modern phenomenon, spending time getting to and from work is as old as humanity. Hunting and gathering (going back 200,000 years), farming (about 10,000 years), and living in cities (about 5,000 years) all involved leaving and returning home.

President Donald Trump is extremely unlikely to capitulate to pressure to resign in the final days of his presidency. And his Cabinet is equally unlikely to force him out by invoking the 25th amendment of the Constitution, despite calls from the Democrats to do so.

Relative to most Western countries, some of which are losing someone to COVID every 60 seconds, we live in a largely COVID-free oasis. This puts us in an incredibly good position to carefully exit from the COVID crisis and manage a steady return to nationwide normality, without the suffering seen ...

English elections that were originally meant to take place in May 2020

There has been a surge in global mergers and acquisitions since the second half of 2020 as the strong snap up the weak. Driven by the tech, media, entertainment and telecoms sectors, total deals for the year were worth US$2.9 trillion.

Greater London is crisscrossed by 14,800km of public roads, each with an average width of 8m. This network accounts for 8% of the metropolitan area, and motorways and A-roads alone cross the Thames and its tributaries at least 400 times.

During the first peak of the coronavirus pandemic, it became apparent that the processing of the standard COVID-19 test using nasal swab samples, while considered a gold standard, was slow, taking over 24 hours to give results in most cases.

GCSE and A-level exams in England have been cancelled, opening the door to a repeat of the confusion that marked the award of grades in 2020.

England has gone into a tough lockdown to halt spiralling COVID-19 hospitalisations and relieve pressure on its health system. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, has said the new lockdown will last at least seven weeks, but it’s safe to assume that, with many hospitals near capacity, it will stay in ...

The year 2020 broke disaster records across the country in destructive and expensive ways. The Atlantic had so many hurricanes, meteorologists ran out of tropical storm names for only the second time. Across the Midwest, extreme storms flattened crops and tore up buildings. Western states repeatedly broke records for their ...

Greater Brisbane’s 72-hour COVID lockdown, which takes effect at 6pm on Friday, has a crucial difference from the months-long lockdown endured by Melbourne earlier this year, or the current restrictions aimed at stamping out Sydney’s COVID clusters.

After the chaos in the US Capitol, stoked largely by rhetoric from President Donald Trump, Twitter has permanently suspended his account, which had 88.7 million followers, citing “risk of further incitement of violence”.

The UK is facing an alarming escalation of the pandemic. Primarily, this seems to be due to a new, even more infectious variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. As of January 5, there are more patients in hospital in the UK than at the peak of the first ...

Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma has allegedly fallen out with the Beijing government. Several recent articles reported that Ma offended the Chinese authorities by delivering a speech in Shanghai in October criticising financial regulation, and that he and his colleagues were called in for questioning.

As much as one billion tonnes of waste could be burned in open and uncontrolled fires around the world each year, according to one estimate – close to half of all the municipal solid waste generated on Earth. But even if the true total is a fraction of that amount, ...

A day after President Donald Trump incited supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office, saying “This president should not hold office one day longer.”

In cities around the world, temperatures could rise by more than 4℃ by 2100 under a high-emissions climate change scenario, suggests research published this week in Nature Climate Change.

In 2018, federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor warned his state counterparts lives were at risk from substandard solar panel installations. An audit of the Clean Energy Regulator by the Australian National Audit Office found there were potentially tens of thousands of badly installed and even unsafe rooftop systems. The regulator ...

In recent weeks, dozens of pro-democracy activists and politicians in Hong Kong have been arrested for allegedly trying to overthrow the city’s government. Most recently, on January 6, 53 people were detained under the notorious National Security law. These arrests are the latest in a long line of efforts by ...

Zero marginal cost, zero emissions energy is now a reality. Wind and solar are cheaper sources of new electricity than coal in most cases, putting significant pressure on the profitability of the inflexible, ageing coal generators.

Two Democrats were announced the winners of the run-off elections for Georgia’s two Senate seats, allowing the Democrats to take back control of the chamber from the Republicans.

After weeks of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud and other improprieties costing him the presidential election, Washington erupted in chaos today as his supporters stormed the Capitol during a joint session of Congress to certify the results.

Now that Sir David is gradually drawing his career to a close with the latest BBC documentary A Perfect Planet, the question appears more topical than ever. But still nobody has emerged to replace him at the top of the food chain. The short answer is that no one can ...

If you live in the northern part of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, the epicentre of one of two current COVID outbreaks in New South Wales, you can’t currently cross any state borders. Instead, you’re confined to the local area for all but essential reasons.

Road-user charges on electric vehicles based on distance driven were announced in November 2020 by the governments of South Australia and Victoria, while New South Wales ministers have differing views. These charges are justified on several grounds, including the costs of road use and congestion.

Bitcoin continues to trade close to its all-time high reached this month. Its price is now around US $34,000 — up about 77% over the past month and 305% over the past year.

But this year will be different because a small group of President Donald Trump’s surrogates in the House and Senate have indicated they will challenge the certification and votes of the electors in what will be a futile attempt to delay the announcement of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.

Trump lost Georgia by 11,779 votes. To pressure this state official to do his bidding, Trump brandished the threat of criminal prosecution. He claimed – falsely, baselessly and ridiculously – that Georgia’s ballots were corrupt even as he was trying to corrupt them himself.

Streaming now accounts for more than half of recorded music revenue. Spotify has about a third of the subscribers paying for music streaming. Playlists overtook albums as the preferred way of listening to sequences of songs about five years ago.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are a great start that should be celebrated, but they rely on a complicated supply chain of freezers and temperature-controlled shipping methods called the “cold chain.” That reliance on the cold chain raises equity and social justice concerns, since many parts of the world cannot ...

Although the Breakthrough Listen team are still working on the data, we know that the radio signal was detected by the Parkes telescope in Australia while it was pointing at Proxima Centauri, which is thought to be orbited by at least one habitable planet.

When UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser declared she was rejecting the US request to extradite Julian Assange, his partner Stella Moris wept with relief. In an emotional speech outside the court, Moris described the ruling as “the first step towards justice”, and called on President Donald Trump to halt further ...

For most people, infection with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – leads to mild, short-term symptoms, acute respiratory illness, or possibly no symptoms at all. But some people have long-lasting symptoms after their infection – this has been dubbed “long COVID”.

In November, news outlets reported the puzzling appearance of several peculiar, highly polished metal monoliths in remote landscapes around the world.

In Australia, New Zealand and around the world, COVID has turned luxury and semi-luxury hotels into quarantine facilities.

Over the weekend, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, claimed Israeli agents were planning to attack US forces in Iraq to provide US President Donald Trump with a pretext for striking Iran.

Great power competition in the Asia-Pacific region has been building for years. But COVID-19 has turbo-charged the shifts taking place and China is finishing 2020 in a significantly stronger position compared with the US than when the year started.