Beersheba, Israel — At 19, Yoni, an Israeli man, has to put aside his plans to join the military and instead enter rehab for drug abuse that has worsened since Hamas’ October 7 attack.

Health professionals said Yoni’s case is not an exception in wartime Israel, noting a surge in drug and alcohol abuse as well as other addictive behaviors.

Yoni, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his privacy, told AFP he had started taking drugs recreationally before, but “after the war it seemed to really get worse.”

“It’s just a way to escape from reality, this whole thing,” said the resident of Beersheba in southern Israel who lost a friend, Nir Beizer, in the Hamas attack that sparked the ongoing Gaza war.

Psychiatrist Shaul Lev-Ran, founder of the Israel Center on Addiction, said that “as a natural reaction to emotional stress and as a search for relief, we’ve seen a spectacular rise in the consumption of various addictive sedative substances.”

A study carried out by his team, based in the central city of Netanya, found “a connection between indirect exposure to the October 7 events and an increase in addictive substances consumption” of about 25%.

Lev-Ran told AFP they have identified a rise in the use of “prescription drugs, illegal drugs, alcohol, or addictive behavior like gambling.”

One in 4 Israelis have increased their addictive substance use, according to the study, which was conducted in November and December on a representative sample of 1,000 Israelis. In 2022, before the war, 1 in 7 struggled with drug addiction.

Contacted by AFP, the Palestinian Authority said there was no equivalent data on addiction and mental health for the Palestinian territories.

‘Shock’

The October 7 attack, when Palestinian militants stormed into southern Israel and attacked towns, communities, army bases and an outdoor rave, caused a real “shock” in Israeli society, Lev-Ran said.

The study found that “the closer individuals were to the trauma on October 7, the higher the risk” of addictive behaviors.

The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Militants also seized 251 people, 111 of whom are still captive in Gaza, including 39 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 39,790 people, according to health ministry of the Hamas-run territory, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.

The Israel Center on Addiction study found an increase in addictive substance consumption among survivors of the October 7 attack, but also among Israelis displaced since then from communities near the Gaza border or in the north, near Lebanon.

“Some who had never consumed addictive substances started using cannabis, some used substances but increased their use, and some were already treated for addiction and relapsed,” said Lev-Ran.

‘Forget’

Lev-Rab said Israel was already “at the outset of an epidemic in which large swathes of the population will develop an addiction to substances.”

The study found that the use of sleeping pills and painkillers has also skyrocketed, by 180% and 70% respectively.

The psychiatrist gave the example of one of his patients, a man who demanded “something” to help him cope and be able to sleep while his son was fighting in Gaza.

At a bar in Jerusalem, Matan, a soldier deployed to the Palestinian territory who gave only his first name for privacy concerns, told AFP that using drugs “helps forget” the harsh reality.

Yoni said that in the early months of the war, his friends and him would take “party drugs like ecstasy, MDMA, LSD” recreationally “in order not to be bored and not to be afraid.”

Then, Yoni started taking drugs “alone at home,” which he said eventually led him to realize “that I need to go to rehab.”

Once out, he wants to complete his military service, Yoni said, to “prove to myself, prove to the family, that I am indeed capable of more, and [can] contribute to the community like everyone else.” 
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Balkhash, Kazakhstan — Seen from the sky, with its turquoise waters stretching out into the desert expanses in the shape of a crescent, you can see why they call Lake Balkhash the “pearl of Kazakhstan.”

But pollution, climate change and its overuse are threatening the existence of one of the most unique stretches of water in the world.

One side of the Balkhash — the biggest lake in Central Asia after the Caspian Sea — has salt water, but on the other it is fresh. In such a strange environment, rare species have abounded. Until now.

“All the miseries of the Balkhash are right under my eyes,” fisherman Alexei Grebennikov told AFP from the deck of his boat on the northern shores, which sometimes has salty water, sometimes fresh.

“There are fewer and fewer fish. It’s catastrophic; the lake is silting up,” warned the 50-year-old.

A dredger to clear the little harbor lay anchored, rusting and unused, off the industrial town of Balkhack, itself seemingly stuck in a Soviet time warp.

“We used to take tourists underwater fishing. Now the place has become a swamp,” said Grebennikov.

In town, scientist Olga Sharipova was studying the changes.

“The Balkhash is the country’s largest fishery. But the quantity of fish goes down when the water level drops, because the conditions for reproduction are disrupted,” she told AFP.

And its level is now only a meter from the critical threshold where it could tilt toward disaster.

There was an unexpected respite this spring when unprecedented floods allowed the Kazakh authorities to divert 3.3 million cubic meters (872 million gallons) of water to the Balkhash.

The Caspian also got a 6-billion-cubic-meter fill-up.

China ‘overusing’ water

But the few extra centimeters have not changed the long-term trend.

“The level of the Balkhash has been falling everywhere since 2019, mainly due to a decrease in the flow of the Ili River” from neighboring China, said Sharipova.

All the great lakes of Central Asia, also known as enclosed seas, share a similar worrying fate.

The Aral Sea has almost disappeared, and the situation is alarming for the Caspian Sea and Lake Issyk-Kul in neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

Located on dry lands isolated from the ocean, they are particularly vulnerable to disturbances “exacerbated by global warming and human activities,” according to leading science journal Nature.

Rising temperatures accelerate evaporation, as water resources dwindle due to the melting of surrounding glaciers.

These issues are compounded by the economic importance of the Balkhash, which is on the path of a Chinese Belt and Road Initiative project, a massive infrastructure undertaking also known as the New Silk Road.

A 2021 study by Oxford University scientists published in the journal Water concluded the lake’s decline resulted from China’s overuse of the Ili River, which feeds it, for its agriculture, including cotton.

“If the hydro-climatic regime of the Ili for 2020-2060 remains unchanged compared to the past 50 years and agriculture continues to expand in China, future water supplies will become increasingly strained,” the study said.

Beijing is a key economic partner for Kazakhstan, but it is less keen to collaborate on water issues.

“The drafting and signing of an agreement with China on the sharing of water in transborder rivers is a key issue,” a spokesperson for the Kazakh Ministry of Water Resources told AFP.

“The main objective is to supply the volumes of water needed to preserve the Balkhash,” it said.

Heavy pollution

The water being syphoned away adds to “pollution from heavy metals, pesticides and other harmful substances,” authorities said, without citing culprits.

The town of Balkhash was founded around Kazakhstan’s largest copper producer, Kazakhmys.

Holiday makers bathing on Balkhash’s municipal beach have a view of the smoking chimneys of its metal plant.

Lung cancer rates here are almost 10 times the regional average, which is already among the highest in the country, health authorities said.

Despite being sanctioned for breaking environmental standards, Kazakhmys denies it is the main polluter of the lake and has vowed to reduce pollution by renewing its equipment.

“Kazakhmys is carrying out protective work to prevent environmental disasters in the Balkhash,” Sherkhan Rustemov, the company’s ecological engineer, told AFP.

In the meantime, the plant continues to discharge industrial waste into another huge body of water, right next to the lake.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Mars and Jupiter are cozying up in the night sky for their closest rendezvous this decade.

They’ll be so close Wednesday, at least from our perspective, that just a sliver of moon could fit between them. In reality, our solar system’s biggest planet and its dimmer, reddish neighbor will be more than 575 million kilometers apart in their respective orbits.

The two planets will reach their minimum separation — one-third of 1 degree or about one-third the width of the moon — during daylight hours Wednesday in most of the Americas, Europe and Africa. But they won’t appear that much different hours or even a day earlier when the sky is dark, said Jon Giorgini of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The best views will be in the eastern sky, toward constellation Taurus, before daybreak. Known as planetary conjunctions, these comic pairings happen only every three years or so.

“Such events are mostly items of curiosity and beauty for those watching the sky, wondering what the two bright objects so close together might be,” he said in an email.

“The science is in the ability to accurately predict the events years in advance.”

Their orbits haven’t brought them this close together, one behind the other, since 2018. And it won’t happen again until 2033, when they’ll get even chummier.

The closest in the past 1,000 years was in 1761, when Mars and Jupiter appeared to the naked eye as a single bright object, according to Giorgini. Looking ahead, the year 2348 will be almost as close.

This latest link up of Mars and Jupiter coincides with the Perseid meteor shower, one of the year’s brightest showers. No binoculars or telescopes are needed.
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PARIS — Women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics has highlighted the complexity of drafting and enforcing sex eligibility rules for women’s sports and how athletes like Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan are left vulnerable in the fallout.

When eligibility for women’s events has come into question, it often has been a legally difficult process for sports bodies that has risked exposing athletes to humiliation and abuse. In the 1960s, the Olympics used degrading visual tests intended to verify the sex of athletes.

The modern era of eligibility rules are widely known to have started in 2009, after South African 800-meter runner Caster Semenya surged to stardom on the track as an 18-year-old gold medalist at the world championships.

Semenya, the Olympic champion in the 800 meters in 2012 and 2016, is not competing in Paris because she effectively is banned from doing so unless she medically reduces her testosterone. She is, however, still involved in a legal challenge to track’s rules, now into its seventh year.

Here’s a look at sex tests in sports and the complexity they create amid changing attitudes toward gender identity:

What is the criteria for female participation?

Testosterone levels — not XY chromosomes, which is the pattern typically seen in men — are the key criterion of eligibility in Olympic events where the sport’s governing body has framed and approved rules.

That’s because some women, assigned female at birth and identifying as women, have conditions called differences of sex development, or DSD, that involves an XY chromosome pattern or natural testosterone higher than the typical female range. Some sports officials say that gives them an unfair advantage over other women in sports, but the science is inconclusive.

Semenya, whose medical data proved impossible to keep private during her legal cases — has a DSD condition. She was legally identified as female at birth and has identified as female her whole life.

Testosterone is a natural hormone that increases the mass and strength of bone and muscle after puberty. The normal adult male range rises to multiple times higher than for females, up to about 30 nanomoles per liter of blood compared with less than 2 nmol/L for women.

In 2019, at a Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing, track’s governing body argued athletes with DSD conditions were “biologically male.” Semenya said that was “deeply hurtful.”

Semenya’s case played out very publicly before 2021, when gender identity was a big story at the Tokyo Olympics and in society and sports in general. She took oral contraceptives from 2010-15 to reduce her testosterone levels and said they caused a myriad of unwanted side effects: weight gain, fevers, a constant feeling of nausea and abdominal pain, all of which she experienced while running at the 2011 world championships and 2012 Olympics.

Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.

Why does sex verification testing differ between sports?

Each governing body of an Olympic sport is responsible for drafting its own rules, from the field of play to who is eligible to play.

Women’s boxing came to the Paris Games with effectively the same eligibility criterion — an athlete is female in her passport — as at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 after the International Boxing Association was permanently banned from the Games following decades of troubled governance and longstanding accusations of a thorough lack of normal transparency. Much has happened in the science and debate in those eight years.

Since the Tokyo Games in 2021, track’s World Athletics tightened the eligibility rules for female athletes with DSD conditions. Starting in March 2023, it required them to suppress their testosterone levels below 2.5 nmol/L for six months, commonly through hormone-suppressing treatment, to be eligible to compete.

That was half the level of 5 nmol/L proposed in 2015 for athletes competing at distances from 400 meters to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers).

World Athletics followed another major sport — World Aquatics — in prohibiting transgender women from competing in women’s races if they had undergone male puberty. The International Cycling Union also took this step last year.

The swim body’s world-leading rules additionally require transgender women athletes who did not benefit from male puberty to maintain testosterone levels below 2.5 nmol/L.

World Aquatics is not actively testing junior athletes. The first step for athletes is that national swim federations “certify their chromosomal sex.”

Similarly, soccer’s world body FIFA defers to its national member federations to verify and register the sex of players.

“No mandatory or routine gender testing verification examinations will take place at FIFA competitions,” it said in a 2011 advisory that is still in force and has been under a lengthy review.

Why do governing bodies care about who identifies as female?

Many sports bodies try to balance inclusion for all athletes and fairness to all on the field of play. They also argue that in contact and combat sports, like boxing, physical safety is a key consideration.

In the Semenya case, the judges at the Court of Arbitration for Sport acknowledged in a 2-1 ruling against her that discrimination against some women was “a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means” to preserve fairness.

Male athletes are not required to regulate their natural levels of testosterone, and female athletes who do not have DSD conditions also can benefit.

“The idea that a testosterone test is some kind of magic bullet is actually not true,” International Olympic Committee spokesperson Mark Adams said in Paris as the women’s boxing debate has raged.

What does the IOC require?

The IOC is at times very powerful and at others not at all.

The Switzerland-based organization manages the “Olympic Charter” book of rules, owns the Olympics brand, picks the hosts and helps fund them through the billions of dollars it earns selling the broadcasting and sponsor rights.

The Olympic sports events, however, are run by the individual governing bodies, like FIFA and World Athletics. They codify and enforce their own athlete eligibility and field-of-play rules as well as disciplinary codes.

So when Olympics sports reviewed and updated how they handled sex eligibility issues, including with transgender athletes, the IOC published advice in 2021, not binding rules.

That was the organization’s framework on gender and sex inclusion that recognized the need for a “safe, harassment-free environment” honoring athletes’ identities while ensuring competitions are fair.

Boxing, however, was different, and the consequences have hit hard in Paris.

The IOC has been in a yearslong and increasingly bitter feud with the International Boxing Association, which is now Russian-led, culminating in a permanent ban from the Olympics last year.

For the second straight Summer Games, the Olympic boxing tournaments have been run by an IOC-appointed administrative committee and not a functioning governing body.

In this dysfunction, boxing eligibility rules have not kept pace with other sports, and the issues weren’t addressed ahead of the Paris Games.

At the 2023 world championships, Khelif and Lin were disqualified and denied medals by the IBA, which said they failed eligibility tests for the women’s competition but has given little information about them. The governing body has contradicted itself repeatedly about whether the tests measured testosterone.

In a chaotic press conference Monday in Paris, IBA officials said they did blood tests on only four of the hundreds of fighters at the 2022 world championships and that it tested Khelif and Lin in response to complaints from other teams, apparently acknowledging an uneven standard of profiling that is considered widely unacceptable in sports.

Who is challenging established rules in some sports?

Before Semenya, there was sprinter Dutee Chand of India who went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. She challenged track and field’s initial testosterone rules passed in 2011 as a reaction to Semenya.

A first CAS ruling for Chand in 2015 froze the rules and led to an update in 2018, which was then challenged by Semenya. Her career in the 800 stalled because she refused to take medication to artificially suppress her testosterone levels and was barred from competing at elite events.

Semenya lost at CAS in 2019 but went through Switzerland’s supreme court to the European Court of Human Rights, where she scored a landmark, but not total, win last year.

In May, another ECHR hearing in Semenya’s case was held, and a ruling likely will come next year.

The case could be sent back to Switzerland, maybe even back to CAS in the Olympic home city of Lausanne, Switzerland. Other sports are watching and waiting.
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LAHAINA, Hawaii — When a deadly wildfire tore through Lahaina on Maui last August, the wall of flames scorched the 151-year-old banyan tree along the historic town’s Front Street. But the sprawling tree survived the blaze, and thanks to the efforts of arborists and dedicated volunteers, parts of it are growing back — and even thriving.

One year after the fire, here’s what to know about the banyan tree and the efforts to restore it.

Why is Lahaina’s banyan tree significant?

The banyan tree is the oldest living one on Maui but is not a species indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands. India shipped the tree as a gift to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries to live in Lahaina. It was planted in 1873, a quarter century before the Hawaiian Islands became a U.S. territory and seven decades after King Kamehameha declared Lahaina the capital of his kingdom.

The tree is widely beloved and fondly remembered by millions of tourists who have visited Maui over the years. But for many others it is a symbol of colonial rule that has dispossessed Native Hawaiians of their land and suppressed their language and culture.

For generations, the banyan tree served as a gathering place along Lahaina’s waterfront. By many accounts, it was the heart of the oceanside community — towering more than 18 meters (60 feet) high and anchored by multiple trunks that span nearly an acre.

The enormous tree has leafy branches that unfurl majestically and offer shade from the sun. Aerial roots dangle from its boughs and eventually latch onto the soil to become new trunks. Branches splay out widely and have become roosting places for choirs of birds.

What happened to it during the fire?

The 2023 fire charred the tree and blackened many of its leaves. But it wasn’t the flames so much as the intense heat that dried out much of the tree, according to Duane Sparkman, chair of the Maui County Arborist Committee. As a result of this loss of moisture, about half of the tree’s branches died, he said.

“Once that section of the tree desiccated, there was no coming back,” he said.

But other parts of the tree are now growing back healthy.

How was it saved?

Those working to restore the tree removed the dead branches so that the tree’s energy would go toward the branches that were alive, Sparkman said.

To monitor that energy, 14 sensors were screwed into the tree to track the flows of cambium, or sap, through its branches.

“It’s basically a heart monitor,” Sparkman said. “As we’ve been treating the tree, the heartbeat’s getting stronger and stronger and stronger.”

Sparkman said there are also plans to install vertical tubes to help the tree’s aerial roots, which appear to be vertical branches that grow down toward the ground. The tubes will contain compost to provide the branches with key nutrients when they take root in the soil.

A planned irrigation system will also feed small drops of water into the tubes. The goal, Sparkman said, is to help those aerial roots “bulk up and become the next stabilizer root.” The system will also irrigate the surrounding land and the tree’s canopy.

“You see a lot of long, long branches with hundreds of leaves back on the tree,” Sparkman said, adding that some branches are even producing fruit. “It’s pretty amazing to see that much of the tree come back.”

What other trees were destroyed in the fire?

Sparkman estimates that Lahaina lost some 25,000 trees in the fire.

These included the fruit trees that people grew in their yards as well as trees that are significant in Hawaiian culture, such as the ulu or breadfruit tree; the fire charred all but two of the dozen or so that remained.

Since the blaze, a band of arborists, farmers and landscapers — including Sparkman — has set about trying to save the ulu and other culturally important trees. Before colonialism, commercial agriculture and tourism, thousands of breadfruit trees dotted Lahaina.

To help restore Lahaina’s trees, Sparkman founded a nonprofit called Treecovery. The group has potted some 3,500 trees, he said, growing them in “micro-nurseries” across the island, including at some hotels, until people can move back into their homes.

“We have grow hubs all over the island of Maui to grow these trees out for as long as they need. So, when the people are ready, we can have them come pick these trees up and they can plant them in their yards,” he said. “It’s important that we do this for the families.”
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Almaty, Kazakhstan — Central Asian leaders met in Kazakhstan on Friday seeking to agree on a shared policy on water management in a region where the scarce resource causes frequent disputes.

Interruptions to water supplies are a regular occurrence in the five ex-Soviet Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – whose territory is 80% desert and steppe.

Hosting the summit, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said it was “necessary to develop a new consolidated water policy, based on equal and fair use of water and strict fulfilment of obligations,” the presidential website said.

The way water access is shared in the Central Asian states has remained the same since the Soviet era and is fraught with problems: those countries with more water exchange it in return for electricity from the more energy-rich countries.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which have more water than the others, have often clashed over control of supplies.

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov on Friday called for the creation of a “mutually economically beneficial mechanism for water and energy cooperation,” taking into account “the limited amount of water resources and their importance for the whole region.”

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev emphasized the need to adopt a “regional strategy on the rational use of water resources of cross-border rivers.”

The volume of water in the main Central Asian rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, is expected to continue falling in the years to come, according to experts.

Shortages of water, along with global warming, is compounded by significant waste due to outdated infrastructure.

After three years of tensions, the Central Asian states are now trying to coordinate efforts in numerous areas, particularly water management, amid growing demand for agriculture and energy generation in a region with a population of about 80 million.

Another concern for the Central Asian governments is the construction by the Taliban of the Qosh Tepa Canal to irrigate northern Afghanistan, which could further threaten water supplies.
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Flying cars, long the dream of futurists, may finally be here. From California, Matt Dibble has our story about the rise of electric aircraft.
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GENEVA — United Nations aid agencies warn climate change is wreaking havoc throughout large parts of eastern and southern Africa, worsening the plight of millions of people struggling to survive conflict, poverty, hunger and disease.

Since mid-April, El Nino-related heavy rainfall has led to extreme weather events across East Africa, including flooding, landslides, violent winds and hail.

In Sudan

The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, reports climate-induced heavy rains and flooding have upended the lives of tens of thousands of people in war-torn Sudan this year, displacing, injuring and killing many.

The agency warns that heavy seasonal rains are creating further misery for thousands of displaced, including refugees in dire need of humanitarian aid.

UNHCR spokesperson Olga Sarrado told journalists in Geneva Friday that torrential rains and severe floods in the past two weeks are having a devastating effect on the lives of thousands of refugees and internally displaced, noting that more than 11,000 people in the eastern Kassala state are in desperate straits.

“They include many families who recently arrived after fleeing violence in Sennar state,” she said. “Some have been displaced three or four times already since the start of the conflict.

“They have lost their belongings, including food rations, and are facing significant challenges in accessing clean water and sanitation facilities, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases,” she said.

The International Organization for Migration reports that more than 10 million people have become displaced inside Sudan and 2 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries since mid-April 2023, when rival generals from Sudan’s Armed Forces and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces plunged Sudan into war.

The UNHCR reports Sudan continues to host about 1 million refugees and asylum seekers from other countries.

Sarrado said the UNHCR is prepositioning core relief items and shelter kits in the eastern and western parts of the country where more rainfall is expected. She added that flooding in the Darfur region is causing concern among aid agencies, as this will further limit their ability to reach thousands of destitute people.

“The humanitarian needs are reaching epic proportions in the region, as hundreds of thousands of civilians remain in harm’s way and famine has been recently confirmed in a displacement site, as you all know,” she said. “The conflict has already destroyed crops and disrupted livelihoods. The climate crisis is making those displaced even more vulnerable now.”

In Southern Africa

While the heavy rains continue to pound refugees and displaced communities in Sudan, the World Food Program reports that more than 27 million people across Southern Africa, devastated by an El-Nino-induced drought are going hungry.

“I have just returned from Zimbabwe and Lesotho, two of the worst-affected countries, where 50% and 34% of the countries’ respective populations are food insecure,” said Valerie Guarnieri, WFP assistant executive director, program operations.

Speaking from Rome, she said the drought sweeping across the region has decimated crops, causing food prices to spiral and triggering a hunger crisis at a time when their food stocks are at the lowest.

She noted that the onset of this year’s lean season, which is usually from October to March, has come early this year.

“People are facing an early and much deeper lean season,” she said, adding that the situation is likely to get worse, “given production shortfalls and dwindling supply.”

She said that 21 million children, 1 out of 3 in southern Africa, are stunted and 3.5 million children are struggling with acute malnutrition and require nutrition treatment.

“These numbers are not as stark as they are in other parts of the region. Countries that are facing famine — Sudan, for instance. However, we should not have these kind of numbers in Southern Africa,” she said.

“We know that to deal with stunting, to prevent wasting, we need to be ensuring that all children and all women of child-bearing age, in particular, have access to the nutrients that they require in order to grow and to thrive.”

To deal with this crisis, Guarnieri said WFP is scaling up its operation to provide emergency food and nutrition support to 5.9 million people in seven countries between now and March.

She said that WFP is facing a $320 million funding shortfall “that jeopardizes our ability to mount a response at the scale required.”

UNHCR’s Sarrado also expressed concern that her agency’s appeal for nearly $40 million to assist and protect 5.6 million refugees, returnees, internally displaced and local communities in Sudan and five countries of refuge “has so far received only $5 million in funds.”
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — What should have been a quick trip to the International Space Station may turn into an eight-month stay for two NASA astronauts if they have to switch from Boeing to SpaceX for a ride home.

There’s lingering uncertainty over the safety of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule, NASA officials said Wednesday, and the space agency is split over the risk. As a result, chances are increasing that test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams may have to watch from the space station as their Starliner is cut loose to return to Earth empty.

If that happens, NASA will leave behind two of four astronauts from the next SpaceX taxi flight in late September, with the vacant seats set aside for Wilmore and Williams on the return trip in February. The pair expected to be gone just a week or two when they launched June 5 as Starliner’s first crew.

NASA is bringing in additional experts to analyze the thruster failures experienced by Starliner before it docked. At the same time, NASA is looking more closely at SpaceX as a backup.

At this point, “we could take either path,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s space operations mission chief.

During a recent meeting, “we heard from a lot of folks that had concern, and the decision was not clear,” he said. A final decision is expected by mid-August.

Boeing issued a brief statement following NASA’s news update, repeating its position that the capsule could still safely bring the astronauts home.

“We still believe in Starliner’s capability and its flight rationale,” the company said.

Boeing will need to modify the capsule’s software in case Starliner ends up returning without a crew.

No serious consideration was given to launching a separate SpaceX flight just to retrieve Wilmore and Williams, according to commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

Tests on the ground have replicated the thrust problems, pointing to seals as one culprit. But it’s still not understood how or why those seals swell when overheated and then shrink back to the proper size, Stich noted. All but one of the Starliner’s five failed thrusters have since been reactivated in orbit.

These thrusters are essential for allowing Starliner to back away from the space station following undocking, and for keeping the capsule in the proper position for moving out of orbit.

At the same time, engineers are grappling over helium leaks in Starliner’s propulsion system, crucial for maneuvering. The first leak occurred before liftoff but was deemed isolated and stable. Then more cropped up in flight.

NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts to and from the space station after the shuttles retired in 2011. SpaceX flew its first crew in 2020. Boeing stumbled on its first test flight without a crew and then fell further behind after a repeat demo.

Officials repeated their desire for a backup taxi service on Wednesday, A situation like this one could happen again, and “that’s why we want multiple vehicles,” Bowersox said.

The next crew flight will be SpaceX’s 10th for NASA. On Tuesday, it was delayed for a month until late September to allow for extra time to figure out how best to handle Starliner’s return. Three NASA astronauts and one Russian are assigned to the flight, and managers on Wednesday declined to say who might be bumped.
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GENEVA — Soaring temperatures in July have had detrimental effects on the well-being of hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have found the monthlong extreme heat too hot to handle, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

“The extreme heat, which continued throughout July after a hot June … has had really, really devastating impacts on communities, on people’s health, on ecosystems, also on economies,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis told journalists Tuesday in Geneva.

“Extreme heat has a domino effect across society,” she said, noting that the world’s hottest day on recent record was registered on July 22. “All of this is really yet another unwelcome indication, one of many, of the extent that greenhouse gases from human activities are, in fact, changing our climate.”

WMO data show widespread, intense and extended heat waves have hit every continent in the past year and global average temperatures have set new monthly records for 13 consecutive months from June 2023 to June 2024.

“At least 10 countries in the past year have recorded daily temperatures of more than 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit] in more than one location,” Nullis said. “You can well imagine this is too hot for the body to handle.”

WMO reports that Death Valley in California, considered to be the hottest place on Earth, registered an average monthly temperature of 42.5 degrees Celsius (108.5 degree Fahrenheit) at Furnace Creek, “which is a record for the site and possibly the world.”

WMO normally does not measure monthly temperature records. But Randall Cerveny, chief rapporteur for the WMO’s committee for evaluating climate and weather extremes, said ”the record appeared to be reasonable and legitimate.”

While human-induced activity is largely responsible for the long-term warming trend, meteorologists cite above-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica as another contributing factor.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, this has resulted in anomalies of more than 10-degrees Celsius above average in some areas, and above-average temperatures in parts of the Southern Ocean.

WMO climate expert Alvaro Silva said two consecutive heat waves that hit Antarctica over the last two years have contributed to record global temperatures.

“The reason is still under research, but it seems to be related with the daily sea ice extent,” he said, noting the Antarctic daily sea ice extent in June 2024 “was the second lowest on record. … This follows the lowest extent that we have in Antarctica in terms of sea ice in 2023.”

Sea ice extent is the surface area of ice covering an ocean at a given time.

Speaking from the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, Silva provided a sobering regional overview of the heat waves and extreme heat events, which are contributing to record global temperatures.

He observed that July was the warmest on record in Asia, while in Africa, he cited record-breaking temperatures in Morocco as having had “an important impact in terms of human health and deaths.”

He said intense heat waves in southern and southeastern Europe have “caused casualties and severe impacts on health.” At the same time, he pointed out that the fallout of heat waves in North America have been quite severe, noting that on August 1, “more than 160 million people, about half of the United States population, were under heat alert.”

WMO officials say evidence of our rapidly warming planet underscores the urgency of the Call to Action on Extreme Heat initiative launched by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres July 25.

In issuing this call, the U.N. chief warned that “Earth is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone, everywhere” and this was posing an increased threat to “our socio-economic and environmental well-being.”

WMO officials also stressed the importance of adaptation to climate change as a lifesaving measure, noting that recent estimates produced by WMO and the World Health Organization indicate the global scale-up of heat-health-warning systems for 57 countries alone “has the potential to save an estimated 98,000 lives per year.”

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said bolstering heat early warning systems in line with her agency’s Early Warnings for All Initiative would ensure at-risk populations receive timely alerts so they can take “protective actions.”

But, she emphasized, climate adaptation alone is not enough.

“We need to tackle the root cause and urgently reduce greenhouse gas levels, which remain at record observed levels.”
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WASHINGTON — Ocean temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef hit their highest level in 400 years over the past decade, according to researchers who warned that the reef likely won’t survive if planetary warming isn’t stopped.

During that time, between 2016 and 2024, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem and one of the most biodiverse, suffered mass coral bleaching events. That’s when water temperatures get too hot and coral expel the algae that provide them with color and food, and sometimes die. Earlier this year, aerial surveys of over 300 reefs in the system off Australia’s northeast coast found bleaching in shallow water areas spanning two-thirds of the reef, according to Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

Researchers from Melbourne University and other universities in Australia, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, were able to compare recent ocean temperatures to historical ones by using coral skeleton samples from the Coral Sea to reconstruct sea surface temperature data from 1618 to 1995. They coupled that with sea surface temperature data from 1900 to 2024.

They observed largely stable temperatures before 1900 and steady warming from January to March from 1960 to 2024. And during five years of coral bleaching in the past decade — during 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024 — temperatures in January and March were significantly higher than anything dating back to 1618, researchers found. They used climate models to attribute the warming rate after 1900 to human-caused climate change. The only other year nearly as warm as the mass bleaching years of the past decade was 2004.

“The reef is in danger, and if we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of those great natural wonders,” said Benjamin Henley, the study’s lead author and a lecturer of sustainable urban management at the University of Melbourne. “If you put all of the evidence together … heat extremes are occurring too often for those corals to effectively adapt and evolve.”

Across the world, reefs are key to seafood production and tourism. Scientists have long said additional loss of coral is likely to be a casualty of future warming as the world approaches the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold that countries agreed to try and keep warming under in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Even if global warming is kept under the Paris Agreement’s goal, which scientists say Earth is almost guaranteed to cross, 70% to 90% of corals across the globe could be threatened, the study’s authors said. As a result, future coral reefs would likely have less diversity in coral species — which has already been happening as the oceans have grown hotter.

Coral reefs have been evolving over the past quarter century in response to bleaching events like the ones the study’s authors highlighted, said Michael McPhaden, a senior climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved with the study. But even the most robust coral may soon not be able to withstand the elevated temperatures expected under a warming climate with “the relentless rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” he said.

The Great Barrier Reef serves as an economic resource for the region and protects against severe tropical storms.

As more heat-tolerant coral replaces the less heat-tolerant species in the colorful underwater rainbow jungle, McPhaden said there’s “real concern” about the expected extreme loss in the number of species and reduction in area that the world’s largest reef covers.

“It’s the canary in the coal mine in terms of climate change,” McPhaden said.
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