No, bacteria (and some other things like fungi) have evolved to eat some kinds of plastic, and we don’t yet know how scalable that is or if it has significant environmental side effects. Regardless, the bigger matter here is that we burn a huge majority of extracted crude oil. If we stop doing that, we can drill far less

A huge majority of crude oil production goes towards fuels and we still have an enormous problem with the amount of plastic we use, we can definitely stand to drill less

Wales implemented a pretty widespread version of this, changing roughly a third of all of their roads from 30 mph to 20 mph (pretty close to 50 and 30 kph respectively). Test areas before the full implementation seemed to go well, and the first year of the reduced limit saw casualties on affected roads drop by a quarter compared to the prior year. That’s only one year of data, and casualties were already trending down anyway, but it does seem promising

It has been very controversial, though. A lot of people do not like it and are fighting to repeal it

Thirteen is just the German contingent, but the other countries are sending similarly small numbers for now. However, this small group is a recon mission, not intended as a fighting force. They’re going there to make a plan for their armies, not to be the army

Oh wow, it really is just 11 lines. The article is significantly longer than the bill

It actually has the lowest crime rate for violence against the person amongst English and Welsh police regions. It has higher-than-average homicide and total crime rates, but it’s not the highest and it’s comparable to other cities

Why would he need to? Reform is well on the way to supplant the Tories anyway, and under FPTP if they do that once they’re basically entrenched

The UK definitely seems like the easier challenge here, given that it’s not a superpower and is currently actually trying to cooperate

Unfortunately Reform have enough candidates no matter how dysfunctional they might be if they actually get elected. I dread to think of the mess they’d make

No, it’s about agricultural standards and food safety. The sentence structure does make it a bit more confusing than it has to be though. It’s:

Starmer has made a veterinary agreement, or a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement, a crucial element…

“Sanitary and phytosanitary” seems to be pre-established language for this stuff in international law, as there is an Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures WTO treaty

I know. I’m not saying that they’re accusing the Marinera of breaking international law, I’m saying that current international law basically says unflagged vessels are fair game

There’s probably a solid argument that the flag-switching made this compatible with international law. Article 92 of UNCLOS reads:

1. Ships shall sail under the flag of one State only and, save in exceptional cases expressly provided for in international treaties or in this Convention, shall be subject to its exclusive jurisdiction on the high seas. A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.

2. A ship which sails under the flags of two or more States, using them according to convenience, may not claim any of the nationalities in question with respect to any other State, and may be assimilated to a ship without nationality.

And then Article 110 permits boarding of ships without nationality. That’s not a comment on the ethics of doing so either way, of course, only legality

To be fair, the Finnish yards are also just really good at building icebreakers. Something like half of all of the entire world’s icebreakers come out of Helsinki

Wir essen Kosmoskost Wir lesen Kosmospost Wir trinken Kosmosmost Und wir sind bis oben hin so voll!

France already has them, though?

You don’t become this rich in the first place if you have a concept of “enough”

Well justified, though it’ll be a goddamn miracle if it actually happens. Even outside of the invasion, Russia is one of the world’s worst polluters

Nokia and Ericsson

Microsoft, Google, and Apple do not make the kind of telecoms equipment that this is about. The big American companies in this field are Cisco and Qualcomm. The Chinese companies are major suppliers in Europe, the American ones aren’t

Huh?

Traditional Western rivals such as Nokia and Ericsson have struggled to compete on price against Chinese firms due to the way they get partial funding from state backing.