00:01France's Minister for Ecological Transition, Monique Barbue, has submitted her resignation on Wednesday, but President Emmanuel Macron rejected it.
00:10Rising energy and fertilizer prices are likely to continue, contributing to global food inflation, the United Nations warned in its
00:17latest report.
00:20The EU's Food Safety Agency has reduced the safe daily intake level of TFA, the so-called forever chemical that
00:27is found widely in drinking water.
00:31A massive blaze that tore through southern France's largely contained, officials have said. France has so far seen a record
00:39area burned by wildfires by mid-July.
00:42Firefighters have been battling near daily outbreaks across the country in recent weeks.
01:02Firefighters are also raging in other areas across Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. In Spain, over 600
01:10firefighters and troops and 29 aircraft
01:13tackled on Tuesday for a sixth day, a massive wildfire north of Madrid.
01:18Much like the rest of Europe, Spain has seen back-to-back heatwaves, which further complicate firefighting efforts.
01:25Scientists warn that human-caused climate change is the cause of more frequent and intense heatwaves,
01:30while also creating conditions for sudden and destructive storms.
01:40France's Minister for Ecological Transition, Monique Barbu, will remain in her post despite her opposition to a bill allowing beharming
01:48pesticides to come back into use.
01:50She had submitted her resignation earlier on Wednesday, but President Emmanuel Macron rejected it.
01:56The Minister will stay due to the urgency to address the consequences of climate change, her office said.
02:03On Tuesday, Parliament passed the government's Emergency Agriculture Bill on the conditional reintroduction of certain pesticides authorized in the European
02:11Union, but banned in France.
02:13The outgoing minister criticized the bill and said the reversal was one environmental setback to many.
02:20The law gives France's Health and Safety Agency the authority to conditionally authorize the use of acetamiprid and fupiradifuron.
02:29The bill's supporters said that sugar beets and hazelnut farmers need the insecticides, which have been forbidden in France since
02:372018 and 2019.
02:39Barbu noted that acetamiprid was banned using the scientific evidence available at the time.
02:45Last year, France passed another bill allowing use of the pesticide, but it was struck down after strong public protests.
02:59The fire is Damage Wildfires emit black carbon, sometimes called such.
03:26It's very small particles of partially combusted material and soilages.
03:29and we breathe them in and then they're so tiny some of them that they can get
03:34through our lungs and into our bloodstream so there's the obvious
03:38respiratory impact that can happen quite quickly so asthma but there's also
03:43longer-term implications like lung cancer or once these particles get
03:47through into the bloodstream they can affect every single organ causing heart
03:52attacks strokes and over the long term even dementia
04:11for people who live in the vicinity that won't be affected by the fire itself on
04:16the ground but will be affected by the air pollution what we need is for
04:20authorities to warn them that it's coming so that if they can move they can
04:23choose to evacuate and if they can't do that to make sure that they stay inside
04:29have air purification if they can and really try and prevent breathing this
04:33pollution in
04:49climate change and air pollution and wildfires is a really vicious circle we know that air
04:54pollutants are emitted at the same time as greenhouse gases that's causing higher temperatures which is
05:00causing more wildfires which is causing more air pollution like black carbon
05:04that's then heating the planet more so we really need to tackle other causes of air
05:09pollution as well as the wildfires to start bringing the temperatures down
05:28the european union's food safety agency has reduced the safe daily intake level of tfa the so-called forever chemical
05:37that is found widely in drinking water the
05:41efsa said the updated values were based on new evidence that showed tfa changes
05:46level of a hormone produced by the thyroid gland that plays an important role in regulating the body
05:53among other effects tfa are used in a variety of products from kitchenware and medical devices to defense
06:01and clean energy equipment but their usage may carry risks to people and the environment
06:07including wildlife
06:09according to the efsa tfa can form when pfa substances break down including from certain active substances in pesticides
06:18tfa can then end up in groundwater soil and food crops it says eu members are required to monitor pfa
06:26levels in drinking water while other monitoring programs track pfa levels in food
06:34the environmental health is connected with human health because the consumption of seafood for
06:40example fish that we ingest the microplastics that they ingest will end up in our body microplastics have
06:46effects on ecosystems ecosystems they provide services to us so they are important for us as well
07:05so first of all we need to take samples um so there are different techniques for this what we usually
07:11use is a manta net so this is a net that floats at the surface of the ocean and thousands
07:16of liters of
07:17water will go through it and all the microplastics will be retained in the net and so we then recover
07:22those microplastics and we bring them to our labs so first there is a processing step that we need to
07:27do to
07:27get rid of the organic material and then in the next step we go towards the analysis of the sample
07:32the technique that we use makes use of a fluorescence coloration of it so a fluorescent dye so we stain
07:37the
07:37particles and then we use machine learning to identify particles based on their coloration and then we also
07:43do a check with the ftir so that's a spectroscopy based method to validate particle identity
08:04it's a screening method meant for monitoring of microplastics and so we start from a training data
08:09set for the model in which we have seven of the main polymers included so the ones that are most
08:14most often
08:15found at sea of course if you want to study very specific polymer types you would need to adapt the
08:20model which you can do so we target most common ones and of course it's not a chemical analysis so
08:26it's a it's a screening so you would need to do a validation always of a subset of particles
08:38it is important to know how many plastics there are present at sea because we want to assess the turn
08:44the trends over longer periods so it's very important that we have continuous data and to
08:49identify hot spots for example areas of concern where there might be risks where not and then of
08:55course also it's important to know the composition of your sample for example the size of the microplastics
09:00has an impact has an influence on the environmental impacts also different polymer types shapes and so on
09:10as well as you can see if you can see the results of the microplastics are likely to continue
09:13contributing to global food inflation the united nations warned in its latest report threatening
09:19progress against global hunger according to the food security report global hunger has eased modestly
09:25but more than 500 million people could still face chronic hunger by 2030 international fund for
09:31agricultural development president alvaro lario warned that geopolitical tensions and potential shipping
09:36disruptions including surrounding the strait of hormos during the iran war could leave an
09:41additional nine to eighteen million people facing hunger ongoing conflicts including russia's
09:46invasion of ukraine remain the biggest drivers of higher energy and input prices hitting small
09:52scale farms relying on diesel fuel this comes as the average global cost of a healthy diet jumped to
09:574.28 purchasing power parity dollars per day up from 3.44 in 2021 roughly a third of the global
10:06population
10:07cannot afford a healthy diet with the share rising to 77 percent in low-income countries with africa emerging
10:14as the epicenter the continent has overtaken asia as the region with the largest number of hungary people
10:20where nearly 60 percent of the world's undernourished could live by 2013. food and agricultural
10:26organization director general q dong yu stressed that ending hunger requires political commitment and
10:32sustained investment to strengthen agri-food systems against ongoing crisis
10:42it had been the scene of the spectacular theft of the crown jewels
10:48the apollo gallery at the lure museum has reopened to the public returning to its original function as a
10:5417th century ceremonial gallery without display cases or jewels the jewels that were not stolen during
11:02the heist will soon be displayed in another room designed as a windowless vault said museum director
11:07christoph laribold in october 2025 a four-man gang broke into the apollo gallery using a cherry picker
11:16and stole eight jewels from the french crown in broad daylight the heist exposed serious security
11:23flaws at the world's most visited museum leading to the resignation of the dem president laurence decar
11:31the loot from the heist estimated at 88 million euros remains untraceable to this day
