On the island where Columbus made landfall in 1492, an entire people was gone within a generation. A diver's account of San Salvador today: its vanished Lucayans, its limestone walls and hammerhead sharks, a patch of staghorn coral against the odds, and a contentment that sits close to neglect.
A solo sailor left Greenland this week to do what no one could until the ice began to fail: circle the whole Arctic Ocean, alone and nonstop, in one season. He calls the voyage itself the experiment — a 10,000-mile measure of how much ice is gone, at a fraction of the cost of vanishing science.
2,300 dead this year, 1.5 million driven from home — a record, more than one Haitian in ten. In June the UN chief came in person and named the real adversary: indifference. A new force is arriving, far below the strength it was promised.
A US fuel blockade — imposed after American forces seized Venezuela's president in January — has cut Cuba's oil to almost nothing, collapsed its grid again and again, and tipped ten million people into what the UN now calls a humanitarian crisis. Largely off the world's front pages.
El Niño is no longer forming — it has formed, and the forecasts now point past "strong" toward the rare "super" tier, with a real chance of the strongest on record. What a very strong El Niño would mean for the year ahead — and why the honest answer is still a tilt in the odds, not a certainty.
A memorandum declared the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Days later Iran declared it closed again, the US struck back, and drones fell on Bahrain — while 20,000 merchant sailors, trained to carry cargo and not fight a war, stay trapped between the two. The war ends on paper; the sea hasn't agreed.
A grey triangle of rock lifting out of the rain, exactly where the arithmetic said it would be — my first ocean passage, at fourteen, sixteen days from Saldanha Bay to a speck found with a sextant and a pencil. The island is still there. The distance that was its whole meaning is not.