Europa

The EU agriculture ministers did not reach the qualified majority to give the green light to new genomic biotechnologies, that is, the whole set of latest generation genetic modification techniques that the EU Commission would like to deregulate.At present these techniques are in fact treated on a par with traditional GMOs, but the objective of the EU executive is to change things and thus simplify the authorization procedures.For the moment, however, around half of the Member States have not agreed.Those who stood in the way were Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Romania and Slovenia.Italy, for its part, voted in favor, maintaining its usual position aligned with the interests of large companies.Agriculture Minister Lollobrigida - commented the GMO-Free Italy Coalition - "has therefore once again preferred to chase the sirens of the agro-industrial, seed and agrochemical lobbies, in contempt of the precautionary principle and the rights of fa...

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. More and more often, after news of fires, hurricanes, heat waves, floods, storms, droughts, we hear that we need to start getting used to what could soon be "the new normal".If we do nothing, what seems like an exception today will become the norm.Yet talking about a "new normality" suggests that what we are witnessing is an irreversible, slow, linear and, in some ways, natural and foreign to us process.But that's not the case. “This is not the new 'normal' and the climate is not just changing, it is destabilizing,” writes Greta Thunberg in her latest book “The Climate Book” (out November 1st) and of which the Guardian he published some extracts.“Until now, Earth's natural systems have acted as a shock absorber, dampening the dramatic transformations underway.But the planetary resilience that has been so vital to us will not las...

Of Alia Alex Čizmić On March 4, in a wooded area near Saborsko, a Croatian village about 40 km from the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, a migrant of still unknown nationality lost his life after coming across an anti-personnel mine. According to Andreja Lenard, spokesperson for the Karlovac police, the administrative region to which Saborsko belongs, four other people, including two Pakistanis, were injured. One would be in danger of dying. That fatal mine was one of approximately 17,000 still present in Croatia, according to data from the Croatian Ministry of the Interior.Saborsko, the victim of a massacre in which 29 people were brutally killed on November 12, 1991 during the war that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, is one of the 46 contaminated municipalities. The problem of unexploded mines also concerns Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 617 people have died accidentally or in demining operations since the end of the war.The Mine Removal Center of Bosnia and Herzeg...

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. From West Nile fever to asthma, climate change is exacerbating infectious diseases and hampering our ability to fight them.This is what emerges from research published in the magazine Nature Climate Change in August, according to which more than half of the infectious diseases known to impact humans have been made more dangerous by climate change. Diseases such as hepatitis, cholera, malaria and many others are spreading faster, affecting large segments of the population around the world and becoming more severe due to climate-related events.And it's not just transmissibility that's increasing:Climate change has impacts on health, immunity and access to medical care. “The global health response to these diseases will have to be massive,” he commented Erik Franklin, associate professor at the University of Hawaii and one of the study's authors.“It's more p...