Energy News Beat

Active listings rise to highest in over three years.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The national median price of existing single-family houses, condos, and co-ops whose sales closed in November dropped to $387,600, down by 6.3% from the peak in June 2022, according to data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) today.

2023 is the first year since the Housing Bust when the seasonal high in June was below the all-time high a year earlier. In other words, June 2023 was the first “lower high” since the Housing Bust (purple line in the chart) and prices have dropped further since June along seasonal patterns (historic data via YCharts):

Prices of new houses, sold by homebuilders, have already dropped 18% from the peak a year ago, as builders aggressively target the new reality with lower prices, smaller houses, “de-amenitizing” spec houses (cheaper appliances, countertops, etc.), and big mortgage-rate buydowns, thereby successfully competing with homeowners selling their existing homes (which we discussed here).

The New Listings are coming out of the woodwork.

New listings of existing homes normally drop after the spring selling season, and they plunge going into the holidays. But that didn’t happen in November.

In November new listings rose to 354,900, according to data from Realtor.com. They’d also risen in August, when they normally drop. And in the other months of the second half, they barely dipped, when they normally drop sharply.

So in November, new listings (red line) were higher year-over-year for the first time since May 2022 (blue line = 2022), and are now just a smidgen below November 2019 (green line). This is a good sign for inventory of vacant homes that is now slowly starting to come out of the woodwork. December is going to be interesting:

When an existing homeowner buys another home because of a move or trying to upgrade or downgrade, they also have a then vacant home that they moved out of. Normally they would sell the vacant home. So they take one home off the market (the one they bought) and they put one home on the market (the one they’re trying to sell). So this creates one new listing and one sale, and the impact on inventory overall = +1 -1 = 0.

First-time buyers change the equation, taking one home off the market without putting another home on the market.

And other situations change the equation the other way, putting a home on the market without taking a home off the market such as: new home construction, or when a homeowner moves into a rental, moves into a long-term care facility, dies, moves overseas, etc.

But during the pandemic-era price spike, many homeowners decided to hang on to their newly vacant homes to benefit from the price spike all the way to the top. But the price spike ended in 2022. So we’ve seen vacant homes show up on the rental market, only to be withdrawn, and we’ve seen them show up in the vacation rental market, as homeowners attempt to cover their mortgage payments and other carrying costs, but landlording and vacation rentals are not always easy. And now we’re seeing these vacant homes show up as new listings.

The fact that sales remain abysmally low, but new listings increased in November, when they normally plunge, confirmed the theory that these are vacant homes that are being put on the market by homeowners who already moved into another home and are not buying again.

Active listings rose to 754,800 homes, the highest since August 2020, squeaking by last year’s high. During normal seasonal patterns before the pandemic, active listings would fall in October and November. Slowly but surely.

Active listings are inventory minus homes listed as “sale pending” (data via realtor.com):

Inventory for sale, at 1.13 million homes, was up 1% year-over-year, and the first year-over-year increase since April.

Months’ supply dipped to 3.5 months from 3.6 months in October. Both are the highest since June 2020. Supply in 2017 through 2019 ranged between 3.0 and 4.3 months (historic data via YCharts).

Median days on the market rose to 52 days in November before the homes were either sold or pulled off the market, the highest since March, according to data from realtor.com. This metric reflects in part how quickly sellers pull their listings back off the market when they don’t get the hoped-for response:

Demand remains at collapsed levels.

Sales of existing homes ticked up a smidge to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.82 million in November from the collapsed levels in October, which had been the lowest since the worst three months of the Housing Bust in November in 2008 (matched it) and July and August 2010.

Sales compared to prior Novembers (historic data via YCharts):

From 2022: -7.3%.
From 2021: -39.7%.
From 2019: -28.2%.
From 2018: -26.7%.

Actual sales – not the seasonally adjusted annual rate – fell further, to 300,000 homes.

Seasonally, January and February mark the low months of the year in terms of closed sales. Sales that closed in those two months reflect the lull in activity over the holidays. June is usually when closed sales peak, reflecting the end of “spring selling season” in the prior months. During the second half of the year closed sales decline (data via NAR):

Sales changes by region, % change year-over-year, from the beaten-down levels last year:

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The management of Polish public television, radio and state news agency PAP have been dismissed and one public news channel that critics say was politicised under the previous government has gone off air.

The culture ministry under Poland’s new pro-European Union government announced the dismissals of the chairmen and boards in a statement on Wednesday, citing the need to restore the outlets’ impartiality.

Critics say that state-run media, in particular 24-hour news channel TVP Info, became an outlet for propaganda during Law and Justice’s (PiS) eight years in office.

On Wednesday TVP Info’s signal disappeared, and so did its website.

“The end of TVPiS. TVP Info was turned off,” Civic Platform – the biggest party in the new government – posted on X.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s coalition, which took power last week, has vowed to create news outlets that take a more balanced approach.

On Tuesday, Poland’s new parliament adopted a resolution calling on “all state authorities to immediately take action aimed at restoring constitutional order in terms of citizens’ access to reliable information and the functioning of public media”.

The vote prompted PiS lawmakers to stage a sit-in in the state television buildings, with the party officials posing for pictures with the television employees.

“This is clearly an attack on the free media, it is a violation of the law,” Piotr Glinski, a former culture minister in the PiS government, told the AFP news agency about the reshuffle.

On Wednesday, Maciej Swirski, the head of the National Broadcasting Council, said: “Disabling the television signal and the TVP Info websites is an act of lawlessness and recalls the worst times of martial law,” referring to events during the communist era in Poland.

Swirski was appointed to the broadcasting council by the last parliament after he was recommended by PiS.

“The illegal actions of the Minister of Culture in relation to TVP, Polish Radio and PAP show how the authorities that supposedly care about the rule of law violate it at every step” former PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on X.

“We will not give up. We will not allow for a dictatorship to be built in Poland,” he added.

The PiS government was frequently criticised by the opposition and non-profits for trying to stifle independent media and limit freedom of expression.

Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in 2020 said “partisan discourse and hate speech are still the rule within [Poland’s] state-owned media, which have been transformed into government propaganda mouthpieces.”

When Tusk’s government took office, it began reversing policies of the previous administration that many in Poland found divisive.

Parties that make up the new government collectively won the majority of votes in the October 15 election. They have vowed to govern jointly under the leadership of Tusk, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2014 and was head of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.

Culture ministry announces sackings citing need to restore impartiality of state news outlets.

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For 48 hours from Sunday night, the victory of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic was total, overwhelming, sweeping, crushing. His ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) had on its own secured a majority in the National Assembly with twice as many votes and seats as their closest opponent. It also swept the regional and municipal elections, winning councils in 165 cities and towns, including the capital, Belgrade. All other parties together claimed just nine cities and towns.

Vucic had won his second five-year term in 2022 by thrashing his closest competitor by 41 percentage points. As Sunday’s landslide was confirmed, the 53-year-old uncontested ruler of Serbia joined his ecstatic ministers, parliamentarians and supporters at party headquarters to claim the ultimate political achievement — dominating and winning elections in which he did not even run.

Initially, just one little speck of dust smudged his party’s accomplishment. Although the strongest party in municipal elections in the capital, the SNS ended up short of an outright majority.

Still, its leaders were confident that with their political experience and control of money, public contracts, lucrative jobs and board memberships in public companies, they would overcome that hindrance. They would need to persuade only six first-time councillors from a newly created movement led by a 69-year-old retired doctor to lend them support. In their 10 years in power, the Progressives have learned how to satisfy the human desires of people they need.

So they boasted, gloated, denigrated and belittled their opponents and teased and mocked their humiliated erstwhile coalition partners.

Reduced to half his Socialist Party’s (SPS) previous strength, Ivica Dacic, leader of the SNS’s almost-guaranteed coalition partner, was close to tears and almost offered to resign. Almost, because admitting failure in Serbia is a sign of weakness.

Serbia Against Violence (SPN), the hotchpotch main opposition group, was convinced that its appeal to modern, sophisticated, urban and educated voters would at least secure it the crown jewel, the city of Belgrade. But seemingly paralysed by the shock of the results, opposition leaders took almost three hours to muster the courage to face the cameras, stuttering incoherently, devoid of any idea of what to do next.

Opposition supporters, who actively campaigned on social media networks, reacted furiously, openly venting their anger at such passivity and demanding their leaders get their act together and fight back against alleged electoral fraud.

Many posted firsthand accounts, videos and photos of apparent irregularities, especially in Belgrade. Videos showed “voters” being bussed in from ethnic Serb-controlled parts of neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina with new identity cards in hand but unable to find their polling stations in the city blocks where they purported to reside. Clips exposed scores of Bosnian-registered minivans converging onto the biggest sports hall in the city. Sensing that the human cargo was in town to vote for the SNS, activists demanded an explanation from the arena management, only to be told that they were extras for a film.

Still, the SPN only regained its composure on Monday. Even before the final count put the Progressives less that 30,000 votes ahead of the SPN in the capital, the opposition had charged that 40,000 ballots were fraudulent. The implication was clear: It believed that without the irregular votes, the SPN would have taken Belgrade. On Monday evening, opposition supporters took to the streets.

Nearly 10,000 protesters blocked the Electoral Commission, finally energising their leaders to take the lead and demand an annulment of the elections and a new vote for the capital.

Vucic and his party remained invisible and silent. Their likely calculation: The media they tightly control, especially national TV stations and a posse of newspapers and portals, all owned by media tycoons who depend on the president for their wealth – and often freedom – would not report on the protests. Invisible to most citizens, the protests would neither grow nor spread and a combination of freezing December temperatures, the holiday season and frustration at fruitless waiting would make them fade away just like many times in the past.

That plan might have worked but for two foreigners who within 48 hours of the Progressives’ victory parade showered it with freezing rain.

First, Stefan Schennach, a member of the Austrian Parliament and the head of the Council of Europe’s election observers, addressed the cameras. Not mincing his words, he said it had not been a fair election: “The victory in Belgrade was stolen from the opposition.” A report by observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) followed, spelling out several irregularities.

The next strike to Vucic’s hopes came from across the Atlantic. On Tuesday, United States Department of State spokesman Matthew Miller asked Serbia to investigate the irregularities, urging it to “work with the OSCE to address these concerns that have been raised”.

Meanwhile, the only international leaders to congratulate Vucic on his party’s victory were fellow strongmen: Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Azerbaijan’s Ilhan Aliyev. Even the Serbian president’s nominal allies whom he often proudly claims as personal friends, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, had lower-ranking officials send the congratulations.

The writing on the wall is clear: Whatever wider geopolitical importance Serbia might have, this time the world is unlikely to allow Vucic to trade that for manipulating democracy. The democratic world wants Belgrade to elect its City Council honestly and transparently.

Vucic might yet have celebrated too soon.

As questions about elections mount and protesters take to Belgrade’s streets, the president faces a rare challenge.

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Some of Israel’s most prominent enablers now claim to abhor the scope of Israel’s wanton killing of Palestinians with a barrage of bullets, bombs, and rampaging bulldozers.

Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak joined France and Germany in calling for a “sustainable ceasefire” to stop the killing.

Like his European allies, Sunak said that “too many civilian lives have been lost”.

Sunak’s belated admonition invites several questions: When did he realise that “too many [Palestinian] lives have been lost”? What was the number of dead Palestinians that tipped into “too many”? Why didn’t 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000 dead Palestinians constitute “too many”?

It is touching, isn’t it, to watch Sunak and craven company find, surprisingly, a moral compass when, all along, we warned them that this is what was going to happen.

We told them that their fulsome embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was bound to mean the litany of horrors the world has witnessed in the shattered remains of Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

But Sunak and craven company did not listen. They ignored us. So, they backed, once again, Netanyahu’s permanent licence to kill as many Palestinians as he wants to, for as long as he wants to.

Netanyahu has obliged them. Happily. Eagerly. Indiscriminately. Almost 20,000 Palestinians have been killed – mostly children and women. Thousands of others are buried beneath the rubble. Thousands more have been maimed in body, mind, and perhaps their souls.

Netanyahu, true to his foul nature, has dismissed every one of those dead and damaged human beings, including boys and girls, as “collateral damage”.

Apparently, Netanyahu killed too many Palestinians, too quickly for London’s, Berlin’s, and Paris’s liking. Hence, the qualified volte-face.

Israel has the right to defend itself, they say. But it shouldn’t kill that many Palestinian civilians that quickly. It’s not a good look, they say.

Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has finally had a “humanitarian” epiphany too.

Not too long ago, Trudeau also told Netanyahu that he could, in effect, do whatever he wanted to do in Gaza and the West Bank since Israel had the right to defend itself.

The silly, verging-on-juvenile hubris. As if Netanyahu needed Trudeau’s blessing to do what he has done in Gaza and the West Bank.

Anyway, several weeks later, like Sunak et al, Trudeau appears to be having second thoughts. Today, he agrees that Israel may have gone too far, too quickly, in Gaza and the West Bank.

Trudeau had Canada’s UN ambassador, Bob Rae, announce the sudden change of strategic heart. Rae told the General Assembly last week that Canada supported a ceasefire.

Trudeau’s decision has provoked a furious rhetorical response from the “no ceasefire” quarters inside and outside the Liberal caucus who, predictably, have insisted that the jejune prime minister had not only abandoned Israel, but sided with the murderous Hamas.

The carnage in Gaza is no longer palatable. Only zealots refuse to acknowledge that the winds have shifted. Trudeau can see what most of us can see.

It is, of course, an indelible shame that he and the other pusillanimous prime ministers and presidents waited so long.

If they had heeded the alarm, they might have saved a lot of Palestinian boys and girls from what former British Defence Minister Ben Wallace has described as Israel’s “killing rage”.

Still, despite the emerging ceasefire refrain, I don’t believe that Israel will end its “killing rage” soon. It’s too late. As long as US President Joe Biden keeps telling Netanyahu that he can do whatever he wants to Palestinians, for as long as he wants to, the “killing rage” will claim more Palestinians.

Inevitably, 20,000 will become 30,000 and on and on it will go until Israel, and Israel alone, decides its “killing rage” is spent.

That doesn’t mean that Trudeau is powerless to help Palestinians in desperate straits. To help relieve their shocking hardship and suffering. To extend a generous, welcoming hand to a people whose generosity and welcoming spirit is familiar to anyone who has visited Gaza or the West Bank.

Trudeau can help but it will require the will to help. It will require Trudeau to push back against the noxious naysayers who will denounce him for doing the right thing, at the right time – just as he did when Syrians and Ukrainians, fleeing want and fear, found haven in Canada.

Trudeau did it on the eve of Christmas in 2015. Back then, in an important display of solidarity, Trudeau greeted the first Syrian refugees to Canada at airports as part of “Operation Syrian Refugees.”

“As a country, we opened our arms and our hearts to people and families fleeing conflict, insecurity, and persecution,” Trudeau said in December 2020.

Later, many of the thousands of Syrian refugees who came to Canada would become citizens. They built new lives here. They went to school. They opened businesses. They became “valued members of the community”.

And, as a tangible expression of gratitude, they, in turn, have helped refugees who have arrived after them because they understood, as Canadians, it was their duty.

In 2022, Trudeau erased bureaucratic barriers to allow many Ukrainians to settle in Canada. It was a humanitarian emergency, Trudeau said, that demanded a swift, humanitarian answer.

As of late November 2023, more than 200,000 Ukrainians have settled in Canada – far from the disfiguring war that has changed their lives and homeland forever.

The applications of another nearly one million Ukrainians for “temporary residency” in Canada have been approved, as have new immigration rules to make that “temporary” status “permanent”.

Canada had confirmed its compassionate bona fides.

The test will be whether Trudeau can show that same compassion for Palestinians. Will he open Canada’s “arms” and “hearts” to Palestinian families “fleeing conflict, insecurity, and persecution”?

The realist in me doubts that he will. Political calculations trump humanity even in the face of the strafing, starvation, and siege Palestinians are enduring.

Syrian and Ukrainian lives matter. Palestinians are the “international community’s” unwanted orphans.

Trudeau will not risk the wrath of the noxious naysayers – and their faithful friends in the establishment press – who traffic in odious caricatures about who the Palestinian civilians are.

That’s why, I suspect, Trudeau broke his word, as prime minister, to 100 injured Palestinian children that he had vowed, as opposition leader, to help arrange care for in Canada to mend their broken bodies and minds.

A politician who deserts children is, I’m afraid, likely incapable of summoning the decency to admit that he was wrong and to try to save them.

That will be Trudeau’s other lasting shame.

When he had the means and opportunity to heal children, Trudeau shunned them and their families because they were Palestinians.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The Canadian prime minister has called for a ceasefire in Gaza but he still refuses to welcome Palestinian refugees.

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In the field of the social sciences, it is very common to say “history repeats itself”. However, there is nothing inevitable about how political events pan out and the choices that political actors make.

In this sense, and in the current context of Israel’s war on Gaza, it is important to consider what foreign intervention in a country’s internal affairs and government can lead to.

When foreign powers decide to eject a certain political player from power and impose an unelected provisional government, they create two problems.

First, the population of the country is denied their voting rights and their right to voice their political opinions. A governing body that does not represent the people ignores their demands and complaints, which leads to precarious outcomes, including internal conflict.

Second, the forced marginalisation of a political party could weaken and silence it, but it could also backfire. The denial of its right to political participation could push its members to reorganise, remobilise and return to the political scene with more hardline approaches or even violence.

The example of Afghanistan is quite telling. In 2001, a US-led coalition invaded the country and dislodged the Taliban government from power. In the subsequent proceedings to form a government, the Taliban was excluded after being presented as an illegitimate actor. What followed was 20 years of political instability and war, which ended with the Taliban coming back to power.

Today, as the international community mulls the fate of Gaza after Israel’s war on it ends, it is on its way to repeating its mistakes of the past. Of course, the history and current situation in Gaza are different from Afghanistan’s, but there is a similar desire to marginalise a legitimate political actor.

Since Israel announced its war on Israel, it has repeatedly made clear that it wants to dismantle and eliminate Hamas, for which it has received backing from its ally, the US, and European countries.

The Israeli military has claimed it is after Hamas’s fighters and military infrastructure, but over the past 75 days, it has become evident that it is also targeting its political structures, including ministries, institutions that provide civilian services, facilities responsible for basic utilities and so on.

Worse than that, Israel has demonstrated its intentions to devastate the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip and expel as many of its residents as possible.

In a November 17 interview with NPR, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to say who should take over governing Gaza; he did insist that whoever it is, it “can’t be people committed to funding terrorism and inculcating terrorism”. He then went on to compare the Israeli invasion of Gaza to the Allies’ occupation of Germany and Japan after World War II.

But the comparison Netanyahu drew between Germany, Japan and Gaza is inaccurate. Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. The Palestinians, unlike the Germans and the Japanese, do not have a state and have the status of an occupied population. As such, under international law, their acts of armed resistance are not equal or comparable to acts of aggression by an independent state with a national army.

Resistance in Palestine under occupation has historically taken numerous forms and has been channelled by various political parties, both on the left and on the right. Yet, Israel has labelled all of them as “terrorist”, whether it was the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or any other.

If Hamas is dismantled, as Israel seeks to do, another resistance group would take its place. This is due to the fact that the culture of resistance is embedded in the Palestinian society on the religious, political, economic and social levels and it will require much more than the eradication of one party to change that.

That is why, the plans of foreign powers to impose an unelected government on Gaza are likely to backfire. The US specifically has proposed the unification of the West Bank and Gaza under the rule of the Palestinian Authority as a step towards Palestinian statehood.

Such a move would deny the right of the Palestinian people to choose who they want to be governed by. It is important to note that Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections in the occupied Palestinian territories and its government was democratically elected.

Since then, it has become so embedded in the Palestinian society in general, and in Gaza specifically, that its marginalisation in any future Palestinian would create massive societal tensions.

It would also create a political, social and security vacuum that would not spell any good for whoever takes over governance.

How and when the war in Gaza will end and what follows next is still uncertain. But one thing is clear: If Western and regional powers repeat past mistakes of marginalising a major political actor and seek to impose their will on the Palestinian people, they would not get a different outcome than they have had in the past.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Marginalising the movement in post-war governance in Gaza would lead to instability.

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Curralinho, Brazil – For communities on the Brazilian island of Marajó, the ebb and flow of the Canaticu River marks the turn of the seasons.

During the rainy months, the river is several metres deep, lapping below the wooden houses that rise from its shores on stilts. Residents rely on its water for drinking, cooking and washing.

But when summer hits, the river dwindles to a stream. Still, its flow is normally sufficient for locals to meet their daily needs.

This year, however, a severe drought has engulfed large swaths of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. All that remains of the Canaticu River in some areas is a dark brown trickle, laden with bacteria and almost completely dried up.

“Now we cannot use it for anything. It wasn’t like this before,” said 36-year-old Elizete Lima Nascimento, who has lived in one of the riverside communities, Serafina, for the past decade.

The dry conditions have sparked a crisis in towns like Serafina — one that could transform their way of life for generations to come.

Inhabitants in the community of Serafina use river water for washing and even drinking [Apolline Guillerot-Malick/Al Jazeera]

Hundreds of thousands of people rely on the Amazon’s rivers and streams for food, transportation and income.

But the historically low water levels have forced residents to reimagine their relationship to the environment. One tributary, the Rio Negro, plunged to levels not seen in 121 years.

“We are completely dependent on nature,” Maria Vanessa Tavares de Souza, a 36-year-old teacher who lives in Serafina, said during a community meeting to discuss the problems caused by the drought.

“Now that climate change has unbalanced everything, it’s going to be hard for us to survive here.”

Already, one of the residents’ primary food sources is threatened: fish. Some have been left stranded as the river recedes — and in the water that remains, the corpses of other fish float to the surface.

Abnormally warm temperatures are suspected in the mass die-off. Residents fear the dead fish could pollute the water as they decompose.

Nine heatwaves have hit Brazil since the beginning of the year, with the heat index in Rio de Janeiro soaring to almost 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) in November. Worldwide, 2023 is expected to be the hottest year on record.

In Serafina’s community hall, residents gather to discuss problems posed by the drought [Apolline Guillerot-Malick/Al Jazeera]

Scientists have blamed climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, for the rising temperatures and extreme weather conditions.

This year’s El Niño — a climate phenomenon that warms surface waters in the equatorial Pacific region — has been particularly intense, contributing to the Amazon’s drought.

But the trend towards drier weather has been a long time coming. A string of harsh summers already led many Serafina residents to dig wells in their backyards to access subterranean water, instead of relying on the river.

Others have called for the installation of a drinking water distribution system, a major infrastructure project that would consist of pipes and storage facilities. They argue the wells are unreliable and cannot stand in for a long-term solution.

Still, well owners like Nascimento say their homemade water systems have been pivotal to withstanding the drought.

“The well is extremely important. We use its water for everything — for drinking, cooking, making açai, washing both ourselves and our clothes,” she said, as she lifted the wooden planks in her garden to reveal the six-metre-deep hole.

Not every family has a well, though, so residents that do own one share their water supplies with neighbours. Paula Lima, 43, brings home more than 50 litres (13 gallons) a day from a well at her cousin’s house on the other side of the community, just to meet her family’s needs.

The trips have contributed to Lima’s back problems. But she has no choice. Consuming the river’s water when its level is so low triggers vomiting and diarrhoea — if not worse.

Many households in Serafina now use wells for drinking water, particularly when the river water becomes too muddy to be consumed [Apolline Guillerot-Malick/Al Jazeera]

Eleniuda Costa Paiva de Souza, a 30-year-old nurse, recently had to take her two-year-old daughter to the nearest hospital — a trip that required trekking across the jungle, then travelling five more hours by boat. Her child had become ill after ingesting the river’s sludge.

De Souza said she intends to leave the community shortly. “Life here is only going to get worse. In town, things will be easier,” she explained.

Isolation is part of life for riverine communities: Serafina hugs a serpentine bend in the river, surrounded by rainforest as far as the eye can see. But the weak flow of the Canaticu River has made Serafina even more secluded.

To stock up on supplies, locals normally use the river to travel to nearby towns. But with the water so shallow, residents are forced to manoeuvre their small wooden boats at a snail’s pace to avoid logs and exposed roots.

Many worry that, if a medical emergency were to occur, it would take too long to reach the closest town.

Downriver, at the mouth of the Canaticu, the municipality of Curralinho has faced its own struggles amid the severe drought.

Located on the southern coast of Marajó, the town and its population of nearly 34,000 saw fires tear through thousands of hectares of nearby rainforest in November.

Curralinho was not alone in contending with raging flames. In the first two weeks of October, more than 2,900 blazes erupted in the state of Amazonas, a record number.

The smoke was so thick that it choked the region’s biggest city, Manaus, complicating navigation and the delivery of essential supplies.

Criminal enterprises have also taken advantage of the dry conditions to clear the rainforest with fire, as part of land-grab schemes.

In the countryside of Curralinho, firefighters patrol a former açai plantation destroyed by fires [Apolline Guillerot-Malick/Al Jazeera]

But in Curralinho, small-scale farmers were largely responsible for the blazes. They use fire as a crop management tool, to remove the remnants of the previous year’s harvest and neutralise the soil’s acidity.

The tinder-dry conditions, however, led some of the fires to roar out of control.

The town had declared a state of emergency as early as September, warning of heightened fire risk during the drought.

Precipitation in the Amazon had been below average for at least six months prior. One of the long-term causes is deforestation: Rainforests soak up and release moisture, helping to generate cycles of rainfall. But without the densely packed trees, the humidity drops, meaning less rain.

“Ten to 15 years ago, these fires weren’t a problem. The forest used to be more humid, which meant the flames would not propagate,” said Ezaquiel Pereira, who works for Curralinho’s environmental department.

Machinery to prepare the soil for planting could stop farmers from starting the blazes. But that equipment can cost about $25,000, Pereira added.

For farmers like 65-year-old Maria Terezina Ferreira Sampaio, such an expense is out of the question.

Fires and drought have caused 65-year-old farmer Maria Terezina Ferreira Sampaio to lose part of her cassava crop [Apolline Guillerot-Malick/Al Jazeera]

Sampaio lives on the outskirts of Curralinho with her husband in a small, bare wooden house where she bought up five children. The couple depend on the sale of crops to complement their retirement stipends, allowing them to buy food, medicine and clothes.

This year, the drought devastated their orange, coconut, lemon and banana trees and impeded their cassava plants from growing to an edible size.

“I’ve been crying and crying. After so much sacrifice…” Sampaio’s words trailed off, as she looked in despair at the parched ground, dry leaves crackling beneath her feet.

Despite their best efforts, hundreds of people have had their crops wiped out due to the lack of rain, said Curralinho’s environmental secretary Esmael Lopes.

On a regional scale, the worst of the drought could still lie ahead, as El Niño tends to intensify in December before petering out in April or May.

In Curralinho, sharp bursts of rain this month have lifted spirits and provided hope of relief from the dry spell. But even if wet weather were to come now, it would be too late, Sampaio said.

“We should already be harvesting. Instead, everything is dead,” she said.

Communities that rely on the rainforest’s waterways now find themselves struggling with fire and plunging water levels.

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The post ‘Everything is dead’: How record drought is wreaking havoc on the Amazon appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

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Over the past 20 years, religious organisations from the Catholic Church to Jehovah’s Witnesses have had a reckoning with cases of child sexual abuse. Many states have tried to tackle the abuse by making clergy mandatory reporters of abuse to officials, just like doctors, therapists and teachers are. However, more than 30 states in the United States do not require church officials to report knowledge or allegations of child abuse if the information is deemed privileged, specifically coming from confession or counselling. It means that abuse can all too often be hidden – and survivors are left without recourse or justice.

Fault Lines investigates how state laws in the US can lead to child sexual abuse in religious communities going unpunished.

Fault Lines examines how state laws in the US can lead to child sexual abuse in religious communities going unpunished.

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Ireland to argue that aspects of the UK law are incompatible with obligations under European Convention on Human Rights.

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The post Ireland to launch legal action against UK over Troubles amnesty law appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

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Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has lost a legal challenge aimed at overturning European Union sanctions imposed on him in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Abramovich had filed a lawsuit at the EU’s general court against the European Union Council, which imposed punitive sanctions on the 57-year-old in 2022 as part of measures targeting Russia and President Vladimir Putin’s close allies after Russia invaded Ukraine.

The court in Brussels rejected the challenge and also dismissed his claims for compensation, noting his role in the Russian steel company Evraz and the fact that steel provided a major source of revenue to the Russian government.

“The General Court dismisses the action brought by Mr Abramovich, thereby upholding the restrictive measures taken against him,” it said in its ruling on Wednesday.

“The [European] Council did not in fact err in its assessment by deciding to include, then maintain, Mr Abramovich’s name on the lists at issue, in the light of his role in the Evraz group and, in particular, its parent company,” it added, referring to the sanctions lists.

Abramovich, who also holds Israeli citizenship and is a former owner of Premier League football club Chelsea, became one of the world’s most powerful businessmen after the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. Forbes estimates his net worth at $9.2bn.

In a statement issued on his behalf, Abramovich said he was disappointed by the ruling, which he can appeal.

He said the court had not considered some of the arguments used by the EU Council, including the proposition that Abramovich had benefitted from the Russian government – which he said was a false suggestion.

“Mr Abramovich does not have the ability to influence the decision-making of any government, including Russia, and has in no way benefited from the [Ukraine] war,” the statement said.

“The court’s decision to maintain the sanctions against Mr Abramovich was based purely on the court defining Mr Abramovich as a ‘Russian businessman’ which under today’s very broad EU regulations is sufficient to remain sanctioned, even if you are just a passive shareholder in a business sector with no connection to the war.”

The businessman has also been punished in the United Kingdom and had his assets frozen in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Abramovich was forced to sell Chelsea after being sanctioned by the British government for what it called his enabling of Putin’s “brutal and barbaric invasion” of Ukraine. The sale of the Premier League club for 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2bn) — then the highest price ever paid for a sports team — was completed by a consortium fronted by Los Angeles Dodgers part-owner Todd Boehly.

It marked the end of the trophy-filled, 19-year tenure of Abramovich.

The EU has imposed 12 rounds of sanctions on Russia since Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine almost two years ago. The measures have targeted the energy sector, banks, companies and markets, and made more than 1,000 Russian officials subject to asset freezes and travel bans.

The EU imposed punishment on the businessman in 2022 as part of measures targeting Russia and Putin’s close allies.

Source: Oilprice.com

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The post Roman Abramovich loses legal attempt to overturn EU sanctions appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

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The bombing of a Jewish community centre killed 85 people, and Hezbollah has been accused of other attacks in Argentina.

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The post US charges alleged Hezbollah member over 1994 Buenos Aires bombing appeared first on Energy News Beat.