‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.
“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.
Five months earlier, the team had braved temperatures of -40C on the sea ice to drill holes and pump 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up on to its surface. It froze almost immediately, thickening the 1.5-metre-deep ice by about 50cm, according to the new measurements.
That has protected the ice, at the start of the melt season at least, and is an early sign that one day, perhaps, it may be possible to refreeze a significant part of the Arctic.
Republican governor Mike DeWine, the who co-wrote the bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty more than 45 years ago, has called for the state to abolish capital punishment, saying it did not improve public safety and could no longer be morally justified.
Iran’s top diplomat has said a peace deal with the US would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, as concern grows that Israel could undermine diplomatic efforts to finally end the Middle East war, with Donald Trump even criticising his ally and war partner as irresponsible.
The White House has argued that funding related to security ‒ including a hospital underneath the ballroom and a rooftop drone center ‒ is separate from the ballroom project.
On Sunday, Israeli settlers torched vehicles and attempted to set fire to a mosque in the West Bank, prompting The Israeli military to deploy troops to quell riots described as violent acts by "Israeli civilians."
A Middle East Eye investigation can reveal details of properties advertised in occupied Palestinian territory, including illegal Israeli settlements, at the Great Israeli Real Estate Event on Sunday.
The Court of Appeal has overturned a High Court ruling and found the UK government’s ban on the direct action group Palestine Action to be lawful.
