As the Israel-Hamas war nears the three-year mark, an outbreak of algae throughout Israel’s desalination plants is threatening the country’s water supplies and also sewage systems in Gaza. And experts say the ongoing conflict is exacerbating the problem.

What did the commentators say?
The issue began after a microalgae bloom in the Mediterranean Sea forced the shutdown of five of the six desalination plants along the Israeli coast, according to Israel’s national water company Mekorot. These closures had an instant ripple effect due to the “country’s heavy dependence on desalination for drinking water”, said CNN. Israel is “arid and has neither big rivers nor abundant rainfall, but its mastery of this technology has made it a water superpower”.

Although Israel is unlikely to suffer a shortage of water, it could compound an existing crisis in Gaza, which has already seen “many of its pipelines and water infrastructure destroyed during the devastating war”, said NBC News. This crisis, in turn, is fuelling the onslaught of algae attacking Israel’s water supplies.

The “discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities”, the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli environmental NGO, told The Guardian. The wastewater “contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae”.

Scientists are “trying to assess possible environmental fallout from Gaza’s destroyed wastewater infrastructure”, said Middle East Eye, and to determine how much of a role it may be playing in the algae bloom. Regardless of the cause, said The Washington Post, this is a “reminder of the dire humanitarian conditions facing two million Gazans”, who have “faced severe water shortages and have often resorted to using makeshift latrines”.

What next?
Experts believe similar algae blooms will continue to affect water supplies as a result of global warming. It’s a “fair estimation that this will not be a once-in-a-lifetime” thing, Edo Bar-Zeev, an associate professor in water research at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, told CNN. We “can assume that this will occur more and more through climate change”.

A civil lawsuit over an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house at New York’s Cornell University has sent shockwaves through the elite institution and beyond. The ongoing lawsuit could be a reckoning for colleges across the US, as Cornell faces criticism of its handling of the 2024 case and the seven fraternity members accused of drugging and raping a fellow student.

‘Hardly accountability’
Why were “these men allowed to ‘pursue their education in a secure and nourishing environment’” after the allegations emerged, said the university’s student paper The Cornell Daily Sun, citing the university’s student conduct code. A “university’s obligation to the physical safety of its students is not one commitment among several, to be weighed against reputation or litigation exposure”. Safety on campus is “not adjacent to the educational mission – safety is, in fact, its precondition”.

Cornell has banned the fraternity implicated in the rape, but this is “hardly accountability”, said Maggie Young at The Vanderbilt Hustler, Vanderbilt University’s student newspaper. The seven accused men “should face a full and thorough criminal investigation, and if the evidence supports criminal charges, they should be charged and prosecuted accordingly”.

‘Failing women’
The ongoing civil lawsuit also alleges that Cornell offered the accused an “opportunity to mitigate their punishment by writing an essay”, said Rita Omokha at Elle. “What does an essay actually repair, remedy or restore?” We “have become so accustomed to institutions failing women that we have started to process these failures the way we process bad weather”.

The case may prompt “universities to reconsider how they measure and communicate campus safety”, said Jeannine Chiang at The Nation. At Cornell, the case has “fuelled anger and demands for greater accountability from the university”. But rape is not a personal issue nor restricted to a single university’s culture, advocate Ray Epstein told the outlet: this happens at higher education institutions everywhere, and tackling that “requires systemic change”.

Uzbekistan’s Jasurbek Jaysunov and Iran’s Amirsina Bakhtiari compete in the first-ever virtual taekwondo event at the Asian Games in Toyohashi, Japan. Competitors wear VR headsets and motion-tracking sensors for the contactless version of the martial art.

Katsura Tanioka / Getty Images

Devon: Smugglers Cottage, Dittisham
This attractive Grade II 17th century cottage sits on a bank of the River Dart with direct access to the beach. 4 beds, 2 baths, kitchen, 3 receps, boathouse, large waterfront terrace. £1.5 million; Inigo.

Hertfordshire: Lock 42, Bulbourne
Picturesque house in an idyllic location beside the Grand Union Canal. 4 beds, 3 baths, kitchen/ family room, 3 receps, utility, workshop, garden, parking. £950,000; Brions.

Buckinghamshire: Formosa, Lock Island, Marlow
This extraordinary flood-proof floating house was featured on “Grand Designs”. 4 beds, 3 baths, open-plan kitchen/recep, games room, utility, garden. OIEO £2.25 million; Hamptons.

Inverness-shire: Onich, Fort William
A magnificent Scottish baronial manor on the banks of Loch Linnhe. The property is set in approx. 4.71 acres of land. 8 beds, 7 baths, kitchen, 5 receps, spa, three fully-glazed pods, a detached studio, garden, parking. OIEO £1.3 million; Strutt & Parker.

Wiltshire: The Old Brewhouse, Quemerford
This handsome Grade II Bathstone house overlooks the River Marden and features a private island garden with its own summer house. 4 suites, kitchen, utility, 3 receps, wraparound courtyard gardens, parking. OIEO £600,000; Fine & Country.

Electoral reform could kill the Labour Party
Ben Walker in The New Statesman
Andy Burnham could destroy the Labour Party “as we know it” if he fights and wins the next election on a pledge to change how we vote, writes election forecaster Ben Walker. The current “winner-takes-all” first-past-the-post system means “parties are forced to contain multitudes”, but proportional representation, with its “quotas”, dispenses any need for Labour’s rival factions to “compromise to beat the system”. “Only on formation of a government would compromise be mandatory. I don’t think our politics is quite ready for that.”

I went curtain shopping during a Kyiv air raid. And not because I’m ‘resilient’
Diana Berg in The Guardian
Things were “exploding in the sky above” Kyiv, yet I was on the city’s streets because I “needed new curtains”, writes Ukrainian artist Diana Berg. “The rational wartime strategy would be to own less, need less”, but we can’t “allow the war to make every decision”. I was “terrified”, but now I’ve got new curtains, and unlike my old ones, they “cover the windows properly”. That doesn’t make the war safer, but at least it’s “slightly harder to see”.

What have they done to Greta Garbo?
Sherelle Jacobs in The Telegraph
AI has been used to bring Greta Garbo “back to life to flog ball bearings in an advert”, and it’s a “terrifying spectacle”, writes Sherelle Jacobs. Yet “the techno-optimist in me” can’t “help but shiver” at how the “rise of the resurrection economy” is “revolutionising nostalgia”. We’ve “blown open a new time dimension”. This cutting-edge tech allows us to “unleash our imaginations” as we “explore what might have been, and reconstruct the lives of history’s forgotten many”.