Amy is going to be in New York next week, which also happens to be home turf for our science editor, Betsy. We figured that was a good excuse to have an actual, in-person meetup. Something we don’t get to do very often: get the team together with you, our readers, no screens involved.
If you’re in New York, please come say hi, meet a few of us, and meet some other folks who read the same news you do. Very casual. No agenda, just real (good) people.
When: 6:00pm—7:30pm, Thursday 24th September.Where: Art Bar, 52 8th Ave, New York.
If you’re interested please RSVP, we’d love to get an idea of numbers.
Speaking of New York… it just had its safest summer ever. The
New York Fashion Week officially goes fur-free. The Council of Fashion Designers of America will no longer allow animal fur at any official scheduled event, effective as of the Spring/Summer 2027 shows that opened last week. Kinda surprised it took this long tbh, but better late than never. New York joins London, which banned fur in 2023, and Milan. Come on Paris. Humane World
Across the pond, Londoners think their city is far more dangerous than it really is. A King’s College study found that just over 12% of Londoners actually experienced crime in the year to September 2025, though the public guessed 30% on average. Murders have fallen by around 15% since 2019, but 40% of the public believe they rose, and half still rank London as England’s most violent cit, (it’s the safest). The Standard
Hungary’s new government promises to scrap the ban on same-sex adoption. The country’s prime minister, Péter Magyar, recently promised “we can state unequivocally that we will change this system.” He’s talking about the requirement, in place since 2020, for the family-affairs minister to sign-off on all adoptions, a de facto ban. The European Court of Justice ruled the restriction unlawful under EU law in April 2026. Reuters
The latest Ebola outbreak appears to be slowing, and a vaccine is coming too. The WHO says transmission is declining across most affected provinces, including the epicentre. The outbreak, the second-largest on record, has recorded 7,258 cases and 3,510 deaths since May. A WHO-backed Phase 3 trial of a vaccine that works for Bundibugyo begins within weeks; frontline workers in hotspots are being offered it as of this week. STAT
Uzbekistan managed to cut poverty by a third in a single year. An overhauled welfare register, expanded maternity allowances and social vouchers helped drop the national poverty rate from 5.8% to 3.9% in 2026, according to the government, reducing the number of people in need from 2.2 million to 1.5 million.
Thailand eliminates rubella as a public health problem. The milestone, verified by the WHO, is the result of a vaccination programme that began in schools in 1986 and expanded to all one-year-olds in 1993. Thailand is the seventh country in the region to achieve elimination.
In 1992, Canada declared a strict moratorium on Northern cod fishing. 30,000 jobs were lost almost overnight, devastating Newfoundland's economy. The pain, however, was also the medicine; this year the government upgraded the stock's status from ‘critical’ to ‘healthy,’ a reassessment that has let Fisheries and Oceans Canada raise the annual quota to 59,000 tonnes. Harvest rates will run 12% a year, well under the 20% ceiling for sustainable fishing. Canadian Affairs
Malawi launches a digital ID, after national coverage hits 99%. Citizens can now carry a digital version of their ID called Nzika Wallet, that has the same legal standing as a physical card (over 13.5 million people already have one of those). The move emulates a similar scheme in Ghana and will cut printing costs, make it easier to deliver services, and advance the SDG of universal legal identity by 2030. Biometric Update
Reminder: Around 800 million people worldwide lack any official proof of identity, locking them out of banking, healthcare, voting and formal jobs. Malawi is the latest in a wave of African ID drives we’ve been tracking this year, after Benin (Edition 341) hit 99% coverage and Madagascar (Edition 345) launched its own biometric enrolment push.
Cambodia has cleared 750 km² of landmines in six months. The country’s mine action authority cleared a huge swathe of contaminated land between January and June 2026, destroying over 20,000 landmines and items of unexploded ordnance, part of a decades-long push to return farmland to Cambodian families. Khmer Times
This is a big deal! India is the world’s third-largest carbon polluter after China and the United States, responsible for roughly 8% of global emissions (about ten times more than the United Kingdom). Its power sector is the single biggest source of that pollution; any shift there moves the needle on the whole planet’s emissions trajectory.
In news that every climate activist in the world should be celebrating, clean energy met India’s entire 7% rise in electricity demand between June 2024 and June 2026. Solar capacity grew by a whopping 77 GW in that period, while just 8.5 GW of coal plants were added, but didn’t generate any more electricity than they did two years ago because they were switched on less often.
For years, the consensus among analysts has been that India’s emissions would keep rising well into the 2040s before flattening out. India’s own official pledge is net zero by 2070, later than China’s 2060 target and decades after the targets of most rich countries. Nobody expected a country like India to start cleaning up its power sector early.
Before we get too carried away, this isn’t a peak: national emissions are still up by 3.7%, driven by a booming steel and cement industry. But it’s a powerful signal that India is not going to follow the coal-heavy path that China, the United States and Europe took on their way to getting rich. If solar keeps outpacing demand growth in the power sector like it has these past two years, India will end up industrialising on a much cleaner grid than any other major country at a comparable stage of development.
Alongside China’s plunging oil consumption, this is arguably the most positive climate story of 2026. Carbon Brief
Iceland ends its blanket ban on gay blood donors. We noted voluntary blood donation supplying 85% of the world’s blood in Edition 345; now Iceland has expanded the range of people who can give it. Starting this month, the Icelandic Blood Bank has replaced sex- and orientation-based restrictions with individual risk screening, deferring anyone reporting unprotected sex with new or multiple partners in the past four months. Iceland Review
And** Iceland is also moving to end commercial whaling for good.** The government will submit a bill next February rewriting the 1949 whaling law to ban the practice permanently, backed by a governing majority likely to pass it. That would leave just Japan and Norway as the two nations which legally allow whaling. Whale and Dolphin Conservation
How protecting one bird created a conservation network in Ecuador. Ornithologist Robert Ridgely’s 1997 discovery of the Jocotoco Antpitta, a species new to science, led him to found the Jocotoco Foundation a year later. It now manages 19 reserves protecting 500 km² and stewarding a further 820 km², sheltering over 1,350 bird species, 80% of Ecuador’s total. At its Canandé reserve, cleared land left to regrow for three decades has recovered 90% of its original biomass and species count. Guardian
New Zealand’s first jointly run marine reserves have opened under combined Indigenous and government control. Five no-take reserves covering 308 km² took effect on 1 July 2026, giving the Kāi Tahu hapū Kāti Huirapa shared decision-making and a joint ranger team with the Department of Conservation. Kāi Tahu leader Edward Ellison is one of six governors overseeing the reserves, after planning began in 2014. Mongabay
Tanzania’s first official wildlife corridor is working, providing safe passage between two national parks. The Nyerere-Udzungwa corridor is 200 metres wide and runs 14 kilometres across the Kilombero Valley, linking savanna to rainforest. Camera traps recorded 1,440 mammals using it in 15 months; 529 of them were elephants. Local communities have planted 100,000 native trees, even as development nearby threatens it. Mongabay
Schemes that pay to leave forests alone are lifting incomes in Vietnam’s Annamite mountains, the ‘Lost World’ we covered in Edition 320. A study of 120 families in Quang Nam and Thua Thien provinces found households inside two biodiversity corridors, created in 2018 and covering nearly 2,000 km², earned 25% more per year than neighbours outside them. Vietnam’s Payment for Forest Ecosystem Services scheme rewards saola and douc langur habitat protection.
Chile eliminates dog-transmitted human rabies as a public health problem, a first for South America. That makes Chile the third country worldwide to achieve this status, after Mexico and Bhutan. No human case has been recorded since 1972, the product of five decades of free dog and cat vaccination, surveillance and rapid post-exposure treatment. “It shows eliminating dog-transmitted rabies is not only possible, but sustainable,” said PAHO’s Jarbas Barbosa. The virus still circulates in bats. PAHO
Amidst the rubble, Gaza’s students head back to school. Al Hadara school was built a year ago from wooden posts and plastic tarpaulin with donations from families and the community. Its principal, Alaa al-Astal, has registered more than 2,200 students for the new term; across Gaza, enrolment is expected to reach 350,000, up 30% on last year, even with roughly 92% of school buildings damaged, and most pupils writing on the floor. El País
Plus, UNESCO has mobilised $5.7 million for Gaza’s recovery, funding heritage-site stabilisation, five higher-education spaces for 13,800 students and support for over 1,000 Gaza-based journalists, and is now appealing for $116.5 million more to scale up culture, education and media recovery efforts.
