Israel-Gaza fighting continues for second day after militant's death

Palestinians gathered around a house destroyed in an air strike in Khan Younis, where Israel said it had targeted a military headquarters

Cross-border violence between Israel and militants in Gaza is continuing, a day after an Israeli air strike killed a Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander.

After an overnight lull, rocket fire towards Israel resumed and Israeli aircraft conducted retaliatory strikes.

Gaza's health ministry said 12 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire on Wednesday, bringing the death toll there to 22 since Tuesday.

In Israel, almost 50 people have been treated for injuries or anxiety.

Egyptian and UN officials have been attempting to de-escalate the situation, but PIJ has said it is not yet "appropriate" to talk about mediation.

What is the latest?

After a six-hour pause, Palestinian militants resumed firing rockets at around 06:30 (04:30 GMT), triggering air-raid sirens in southern and central Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said more than 50 rockets had been launched by midday, bringing the total since Tuesday to 250. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionMost of the rockets fired by Palestinian militants have been intercepted by Israeli air defences

The IDF said it had bombed more PIJ targets in Gaza on Wednesday in response, including a military headquarters in Khan Younis and a factory manufacturing warheads for long-range rockets in the south of the strip.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza reported that 12 people had been killed.

What happened on Tuesday?

A pre-dawn Israeli air strike on a residential building in eastern Gaza City killed Baha Abu al-Ata, a senior PIJ military commander, and his wife.

At about the same time, the home of another leader of the Iran-backed group was struck by an Israeli missile in Damascus, killing two people, Syrian state media said. Israel did not comment on the incident.

Media captionGaza militants retaliated with rocket fire - then Israel responded with further air strikes

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described Abu al-Ata as an "arch-terrorist" and a "ticking bomb" who posed an imminent threat to the country.

Abu al-Ata was thought to be behind recent rocket fire from Gaza and to have acted increasingly outside of the control of the dominant militant faction Hamas.

Militants in Gaza said Israel had crossed a "red line" and fired more than 200 rockets in response.

About 90% of the rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome air defence systems, the IDF said, but one exploded on a main road close to passing cars, and elsewhere two people were lightly injured by shrapnel. An eight-year-old girl also suffered a heart attack in a bomb shelter and remains in a serious condition.

IDF said it carried out air strikes in Gaza targeting PIJ rocket-launching units and infrastructure.

Gaza's health ministry said eight people were killed, in addition to Abu al-Ata and his wife. Seven of them were reportedly militants.

What are both sides saying?

PIJ spokesman Musab al-Buraim told the Hamas-linked Shehab news agency that it was not "appropriate" to discuss Egyptian efforts to end the flare-up when the group was still retaliating for Abu al-Ata's death.

Image copyrightAFP

Image captionPalestinian Islamic Jihad has vowed to avenge the death of Baha Abu al-Ata (pictured)

"When we complete the response, it is possible to discuss calm," he said.

At the start of a special cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu warned PIJ that if it did not halt the rocket fire Israel would continue to hit Gaza.

"Either stop these attacks or absorb more and more blows," he said.

Earlier, IDF spokesman Brig Gen Hidai Zilberman told Israeli media that PIJ was "operating in a measured way, maintaining its arsenal of rockets for several days of battle and is keeping its options open", and that the IDF was "walking a tightrope" to avoid drawing Hamas into the conflict.

Source of the news: BBC NEWS

Electric car future may depend on deep sea mining

Apollo II is a prototype deep sea mining machine being tested off the coast of Malaga

The future of electric cars may depend on mining critically important metals on the ocean floor.

That's the view of the engineer leading a major European investigation into new sources of key elements.

Demand is soaring for the metal cobalt - an essential ingredient in batteries and abundant in rocks on the seabed.

Laurens de Jonge, who's running the EU project, says the transition to electric cars means "we need those resources".

Media captionThe BBC's David Shukman explains how deep sea mining works

He was speaking during a unique set of underwater experiments designed to assess the impact of extracting rocks from the ocean floor.

In calm waters 15km off the coast of Malaga in southern Spain, a prototype mining machine was lowered to the seabed and 'driven' by remote control.

Cameras attached to the Apollo II machine recorded its progress and, crucially, monitored how the aluminium tracks stirred up clouds of sand and silt as they advanced.

An array of instruments was positioned nearby to measure how far these clouds were carried on the currents - the risk of seabed mining smothering marine life over a wide area is one of the biggest concerns.

What is 'deep sea mining'?

It's hard to visualise, but imagine opencast mining taking place at the bottom of the ocean, where huge remote-controlled machines would excavate rocks from the seabed and pump them up to the surface.

The concept has been talked about for decades, but until now it's been thought too difficult to operate in the high-pressure, pitch-black conditions as much as 5km deep.

Now the technology is advancing to the point where dozens of government and private ventures are weighing up the potential for mines on the ocean floor.

Why would anyone bother?

The short answer: demand. The rocks of the seabed are far richer in valuable metals than those on land and there's a growing clamour to get at them.

Billions of potato-sized rocks known as "nodules" litter the abyssal plains of the Pacific and other oceans and many are brimming with cobalt, suddenly highly sought after as the boom in the production of batteries gathers pace.

At the moment, most of the world's cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo where for years there've been allegations of child labour, environmental damage and widespread corruption.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionCurrent technology for electric car batteries require cobalt, thought to be abundant on the sea floor

Expanding production there is not straightforward which is leading mining companies to weigh the potential advantages of cobalt on the seabed.

Laurens de Jonge, who's in charge of the EU project, known as Blue Nodules, said: "It's not difficult to access - you don't have to go deep into tropical forests or deep into mines.

"It's readily available on the seafloor, it's almost like potato harvesting only 5km deep in the ocean."

And he says society faces a choice: there may be in future be alternative ways of making batteries for electric cars - and some manufacturer are exploring them - but current technology requires cobalt.

Image copyrightGEOMAR

Image captionLaurens de Jonge likens the process to "potato harvesting" 5km down in the ocean

"If you want to make a fast change, you need cobalt quick and you need a lot of it - if you want to make a lot of batteries you need the resources to do that."

His view is backed by a group of leading scientists at London's Natural History Museum and other institutions.

They recently calculated that meeting the UK's targets for electric cars by 2050 would require nearly twice the world's current output of cobalt.

So what are the risks?

No one can be entirely sure, which makes the research off Spain highly relevant.

It's widely accepted that whatever is in the path of the mining machines will be destroyed - there's no argument about that.

But what's uncertain is how far the damage will reach, in particular the size of the plumes of silt and sand churned up and the distance they will travel, potentially endangering marine life far beyond the mining site.

The chief scientist on board, Henko de Stigter of the Dutch marine research institute NIOZ, points out that life in the deep Pacific - where mining is likely to start first - has adapted to the usually "crystal clear conditions".

So for any organisms feeding by filter, waters that are suddenly filled with stirred-up sediment would be threatening.

"Many species are unknown or not described, and let alone do we know how they will respond to this activity - we can only estimate."

And Dr de Stigter warned of the danger of doing to the ocans what humanity has done to the land.

"With every new human activity it's often difficult to foresee all the consequences of that in the long term.

"What is new here is that we are entering an environment that is almost completely untouched."

Could deep sea mining be made less damaging?

Ralf Langeler thinks so. He's the engineer in charge of the Apollo II mining machine and he believes the design will minimise any impacts.

Like Laurens de Jonge, he works for the Dutch marine engineering giant Royal IHC and he says his technology can help reduce the environmental effects.

The machine is meant to cut a very shallow slice into the top 6-10cm of the seabed, lifting the nodules. Its tracks are made with lightweight aluminium to avoid sinking too far into the surface.

Image captionDavid Shukman (R) talks to Ralf Langeler, the engineer in charge of the Apollo II mining machine

Silt and sand stirred up by the extraction process should then be channelled into special vents at the rear of the machine and released in a narrow stream, to try to avoid the plume spreading too far.

"We'll always change the environment, that's for sure," Ralf says, "but that's the same with onshore mining and our purpose is to minimise the impact."

I ask him if deep sea mining is now a realistic prospect.

"One day it's going to happen, especially with the rising demand for spwcial metals - and they're there on the sea floor."

Who decides if it goes ahead?

Mining in territorial waters can be approved by an individual government.

That happened a decade ago when Papua New Guinea gave the go-ahead to a Canadian company, Nautilus Minerals, to mine gold and copper from hydrothermal vents in the Bismarck Sea.

Since then the project has been repeatedly delayed as the company ran short of funds and the prime minister of PNG called for a ten-year moratorium on deep sea mining.

A Nautilus Minerals representative has told me that the company is being restructured and that they remain hopeful of starting to mine.

Meanwhile, nearly 30 other ventures are eyeing areas of ocean floor beyond national waters, and these are regulated by a UN body, the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

It has issued licences for exploration and is due next year to publish the rules that would govern future mining.

The EU's Blue Nodules project involves a host of different institutions and countries.

The vessel used for the underwater research off Spain, the Sarmiento de Gamboa, is operated by CSIC, the Spanish National Research Council.

Source of the news: BBC NEWS

Netherlands forced to slash speed limit to reduce emissions

The current motorway speed limit is 130km/h although a lower limit can apply at various times and places

The daytime speed limit on Dutch roads is to be cut to 100km/h (62mph) in a bid to tackle a nitrogen oxide pollution crisis, according to cabinet sources widely quoted by Dutch media.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte said it was a "rotten measure" but necessary. The existing limit of up to 130km/h will still be permitted at night.

The new limit is set to come in next year along with several other measures.

Ministers have been grappling with ways of responding to the emissions problem.

"No-one likes this," Mr Rutte told a news conference. "But there's really something bigger at stake. We have to stop the Netherlands from coming to a halt and jobs being lost unnecessarily."

He said it was the deepest crisis he had ever dealt with in nine years in power and the refugee crisis in 2015-16 bore no comparison.

Why are they acting now?

The crisis is so severe that big infrastructure projects have been put on hold. A ruling in May by the top court in the Netherlands on nitrogen oxide emissions affected thousands of plans for roads, housing and airports.

The Council of State said Dutch rules for granting building and farming permits breached EU law protecting nature from emissions such as ammonia and nitrous oxide.

The government wants to build 75,000 homes next year, so for the past week the cabinet has tried to find a solution to cutting the pollutants. Among the options discussed by ministers was a ban on vehicles on Sunday.

Media captionNitrogen dioxide air pollution 5-10 January (sequence is played twice)

Drivers will be allowed to revert to the current maximum between 19:00 and 06:00. Only 8%-10% of cars are thought to travel between those times.

Even with the lower 100km/h speed limit there could still be emissions problems in areas such as the congested Randstad central-west belt, home to the biggest Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.

Bringing the motorway speed limit down to 100km/h will make the Netherlands the lowest in Europe, on a par with Cyprus which has far fewer motorways.

Maximum road speed limits (km/h)

Netherlands' proposed new speed

Source: EC/ Some German roads have no limit

The most common maximum speed limit in Europe is 130km/h while in the UK it is 70mph (112 km/h).

Although the Dutch measure is being seen as temporary, Mr Rutte said he would not make any promises on limiting it. While ministers want to introduce the reduced speed limit soon, it will have to be co-ordinated and road signs changed.

Why farmers will be affected too

Last month, farmers reacted angrily to claims that intensive farming was partly to blame for the emissions problem, after a report called for drastic measures to reduce livestock as well as action on the roads.

Media captionDutch farmers clogged up more than 1,000km of roads with their tractors

A tractor protest caused the worst-ever morning rush hour in the country as farmers argued they were being victimised.

Another of the measures announced on Wednesday is a plan to change livestock feed to include an enzyme that reduces nitrogen oxide emissions from cows.

Farmers are also set to be affected by plans next month to cut emissions in protected areas of the country that are part of a European network known as Natura 2000.

A project to bring the Formula 1 Grand Prix back to Zandvoort next year was criticised by some environmentalists, who raised concerns about emissions from the race as well as from work to extend the circuit.

Source of the news: BBC NEWS