International

"Experts meet in Bangkok this week to advance what would be the first international treaty to tackle the surging problem of plastic pollution. Final treaty negotiations take place in South Korea in November. Yet most of the people who have been closely tracking the negotiations — environmentalists, tribal leaders and residents from communities hard-hit by plastic production and waste — are shut out of the talks in Bangkok."

"New analyses reveal that 4.4 billion people across low- and middle-income countries — over half of the world’s population — don’t have safe household drinking water."

"Summer now has a darker side – or rather a too-brightly burning and dangerously hot side. And that side is making summer the most dangerous season of the year. This month’s bookshelf focuses on two summer dangers: heat waves and wildfires."

"Eighty years ago, the United States and Mexico worked out an arrangement to share water from the two major rivers that run through both countries: the Rio Grande and the Colorado. The treaty was created when water wasn't as scarce as it is now."

"Cattle at a Queensland feedlot were fed red seaweed for 200 days in one of the longest trials of the additive – but experts say it’s not farm-ready"

"The continued burning of fossil fuels is closing schools around the world for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and threatening to undermine one of the greatest global gains of recent decades: children’s education."

"The World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreaks in Congo and elsewhere in Africa a global emergency on Wednesday, with cases confirmed among children and adults in more than a dozen countries and a new form of the virus spreading. Few vaccine doses are available on the continent."