The most common microplastics in the environment are microfibers—plastic fragments shaped like tiny threads or filaments. Microfibers come from many sources, including cigarette butts, fishing nets and ropes, but the biggest source is synthetic fabrics, which constantly shed them.

Textiles shed microfibers while they are manufactured, worn and disposed of, but especially when they are washed. A single wash load can release several million microfibers. Many factors affect how many fibers are released, including fabric type, mechanical action, detergents, temperature and the duration of the wash cycle.

When people think about children outside their family and close friends, they commonly make basic needs the priorities. Food, shelter and services such as health and education come first.

When we think of children we have a close relationship with, it's different. We see all their needs as important, immediate and interconnected.

People give as much priority to the higher-order needs as the basic needs of children they're close to.

This thinking carries over into policymaking and intervention priorities in low and middle-income countries. As a result, many interventions in the lives of other people's children, such as responses to a refugee crisis and alternative care for children, put basic needs first.

Our research in the fields of sociology and development economics suggests that children's needs are not hierarchical and that they are best met by—and in—families. By drawing on examples from the literature, we outline how children's various needs are equally important. Caring for them is therefore a balancing act, best done by those close to them: their families.

Two episodes in so far:

Episode #193 - The main export of the western world is trash. - Anarchism Pt. 2 (Bookchin, Social Ecology)

Episode #192 - Should we overthrow the government tomorrow? - Anarchism Pt. 1 (Chomsky, Malatesta)

more episodes to come.

If you have not heard this show so far, it has been running for something like 10 years, is very well presented and well worth a listen.

A man under arrest by Russian internal security forces was seen confessing to a “crime”, in a video posted on January 2. He had been apprehended after allegedly posting a video on social media that purportedly showed air defences near the Russian city of Belgorod. This city, on the border with Ukraine, was the target of Ukrainian missile attacks on the same day.

What was notable, though, about this confessional was that the man was flanked by two internal security officers who had the word Smersh emblazoned on the backs of their jackets.

Many people in the west remember Smersh from Ian Fleming’s early James Bond novels (and early films). It was the shadowy Soviet spy agency bent on eliminating the fictional British agent.

But there was nothing fictitious about Smersh itself. It was a real counterintelligence agency set up in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union during the second world war.

For me, pizza and TV tonight, a pub lunch with some friends tomorrow and a film in the evening, then a day full of chores and general adulting on Sunday that we have been putting off for ages, didn't do over over Christmas and probably still won't this Sunday either.

How about you?

What is made from the same wood as a Christmas tree, held together by glue and manufactured in a Swedish factory for assembly later?

If that calls to mind flat-pack furniture and meatballs, you're wrong.

If you answered "a wooden wind turbine", you could be a visionary.

According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world's tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future.

"It's got great potential," Otto Lundman, the company's chief executive, says as we gaze upwards at the firm's brand new turbine, a short drive outside Gothenburg.

It's 150m (492ft) to the tip of the highest blade and we are the first journalists to be invited to have a look inside. The 2 megawatt generator on top has just started supplying electricity to the Swedish grid, providing power for about 400 homes.

The dream of Lundman and Modvion is to take the wood and wind much higher.

A landmark agreement to safeguard one of Europe’s most important wetlands underscores the importance of harnessing public opinion to drive the green transition and help mitigate the effects of the climate emergency, the country’s environment minister has said.

The Doñana in western Andalucía – whose marshes, forests and dunes extend across almost 130,000 hectares (320,000 acres) and include a Unesco-listed national park – has been at the centre of a furious national and international row over recent years.

The far-right Alternative for Germany has won its first election for mayor of a midsized German town, another milestone in the rising popularity of the party that has been boosted by voter disillusionment with the country’s ruling coalition.

Tim Lochner won 38.5 per cent of votes in Sunday’s second round ballot in Pirna, a town in eastern Germany close to the Czech border, seeing off candidates from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and the liberal Free Democrats.

Lochner, a 53-year-old carpenter, is not a member of the AfD but stood as the party’s candidate.

The unpopularity of Germany’s ruling coalition was underlined by a survey published by Bild Zeitung on Saturday showing 59 per cent of people want elections next year to change the federal government even though a poll is not due until 2025.

The victory for the AfD in Pirna, a town of 40,000 inhabitants south-east of Dresden, followed a strong showing in regional elections in October.

Original article.

A maximum indoor temperature working law giving people a day off if workplace temperatures surpass 30C should be mandated by government, a new report recommends.

The report by the Fabian Society thinktank highlights inequalities in who bears the brunt of the impacts of climate breakdown and puts responsibility on bosses and landlords to stop people from overheating.

An increasing number of people are dying from excessive heat in the UK. More than 4,500 people died in England in 2022 due to high temperatures, which was the largest figure on record. Between 1988 and 2022, almost 52,000 deaths associated with the hottest days were recorded in England, with a third of them occurring since 2016, data from the Office for National Statistics shows. During the same 35-year period analysed, more than 2,000 people died in Wales due to the warm temperatures.

The Reverend Todd Eklof is an amateur ventriloquist, a social justice activist, a father and an atheist. He is also at the heart of a struggle for the future of America’s most liberal church.

At around lunchtime on Friday 21 June 2019, the third day of the annual general assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) in Spokane, Washington state, Eklof began handing out a book of three essays he’d spent the previous 10 months working on: The Gadfly Papers.

Unitarian Universalism, a religious movement with some 150,000 members across the US, has long been considered a beacon of progressivism, pluralism and tolerance. But in these essays, Eklof launched a stinging attack on its leadership, arguing that the UUA was driving the church in an illiberal, dogmatic, intolerant and “identitarian” direction and that it had become a “self-perpetuating echo chamber” that prioritised “emotional thinking” over logic and reason.

Original link (paywalled).