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Harmful bleaching of the world’s coral has grown to include 84% of the ocean’s reefs in the most intense event of its kind in recorded history, the International Coral Reef Initiative announced Wednesday.It’s the fourth global bleaching event since 1998, and has now surpassed bleaching from 2014-17 that hit some two-thirds of reefs, said the ICRI, a mix of more than 100 governments, non-governmental organizations and others. And it’s not clear when the current crisis, which began in 2023 and is blamed on warming oceans, will end.“We may never see the heat stress that causes bleaching dropping below the threshold that triggers a global event,” said Mark Eakin, executive secretary for the International Coral Reef Society and retired coral monitoring chief for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.“We’re looking at something that’s completely changing the face of our planet and the ability of our oceans to sustain lives and livelihoods,” Eakin said.Last year was Earth’s hottest year on record, and much of that is going into oceans. The average annual sea surface temperature of oceans away from the poles was a record 20.87 degrees Celsius (69.57 degrees Fahrenheit).That’s deadly to corals, which are key to seafood production, tourism and protecting coastlines from erosion and storms. Coral reefs are sometimes dubbed “rainforests of the sea” because they support high levels of biodiversityapproximately 25% of all marine species can be found in, on and around coral reefs.Coral get their bright colors from the colorful algae that live inside them and are a food source for the corals. Prolonged warmth causes the algae to release toxic compounds, and the coral eject them. A stark white skeleton is left behind, and the weakened coral is at heightened risk of dying.The bleaching event has been so severe that NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program has had to add levels to its bleaching alert scale to account for the growing risk of coral death.Efforts are underway to conserve and restore coral. One Dutch lab has worked with coral fragments, including some taken from off the coast of the Seychelles, to propagate them in a zoo so that they might be used someday to repopulate wild coral reefs if needed. Other projects, including one off Florida, have worked to rescue corals endangered by high heat and nurse them back to health before returning them to the ocean.But scientists say it’s essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet, such as carbon dioxide and methane.“The best way to protect coral reefs is to address the root cause of climate change. And that means reducing the human emissions that are mostly from burning of fossil fuels . . . everything else is looking more like a Band-Aid rather than a solution,” Eakin said.“I think people really need to recognize what they’re doing . . . inaction is the kiss of death for coral reefs,” said Melanie McField, co-chair of the Caribbean Steering Committee for the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, a network of scientists that monitors reefs throughout the world.The group’s update comes as President Donald Trump has moved aggressively in his second term to boost fossil fuels and roll back clean energy programs, which he says is necessary for economic growth.“We’ve got a government right now that is working very hard to destroy all of these ecosystems . . . removing these protections is going to have devastating consequences,” Eakin said. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Isabella O’Malley, Associated Press
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European Union watchdogs fined Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of euros Wednesday as they stepped up enforcement of the 27-nation bloc’s digital competition rules.The European Commission imposed a 500 million euro ($571 million) fine on Apple for preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store.The commission, which is the EU’s executive arm, also fined Meta Platforms 200 million euros because it forced Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them.The punishments were smaller than the blockbuster multibillion-euro fines that the commission has previously slapped on Big Tech companies in antitrust cases.Apple and Meta have to comply with the decisions within 60 days or risk unspecified “periodic penalty payments,” the commission said.The decisions were expected to come in March, but officials apparently held off amid an escalating trans-Atlantic trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly complained about regulations from Brussels affecting American companies.The penalties were issued under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, also known as the DMA. It’s a sweeping rulebook that amounts to a set of do’s and don’ts designed to give consumers and businesses more choice and prevent Big Tech “gatekeepers” from cornering digital markets.The DMA seeks to ensure “that citizens have full control over when and how their data is used online, and businesses can freely communicate with their own customers,” Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, said in a statement.“The decisions adopted today find that both Apple and Meta have taken away this free choice from their users and are required to change their behavior,” Virkkunen said.Both companies indicated they would appeal.Apple accused the commission of “unfairly targeting” the iPhone maker, and said it “continues to move the goal posts” despite the company’s efforts to comply with the rules.Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a statement that the “Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.”In the App Store case, the Commission had accused the iPhone maker of imposing unfair rules preventing app developers from freely steering consumers to other channels.Among the DMA’s provisions are requirements to let developers inform customers of cheaper purchasing options and direct them to those offers.The commission said it ordered Apple to remove technical and commercial restrictions that prevent developers from steering users to other channels, and to end “non-compliant” conduct.Apple said it has “spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for.”“Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way,” the company said.The EU’s Meta investigation centered on the company’s strategy to comply with strict European data privacy rules by giving users the option of paying for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram.Users could pay at least 10 euros ($11) a month to avoid being targeted by ads based on their personal data. The U.S. tech giant rolled out the option after the European Union’s top court ruled Meta must first get consent before showing ads to users, in a decision that threatened its business model of tailoring ads based on individual users’ online interests and digital activity.Regulators took issue with Meta’s model, saying it doesn’t allow users to exercise their right to “freely consent” to allowing their personal data from its various services, which also including Facebook Marketplace, WhatsApp, and Messenger, to be combined for personalized ads.Meta rolled out a third option in November giving Facebook and Instagram users in Europe the option to see fewer personalized ads if they don’t want to pay for an ad-free subscription. The commission said it’s “currently assessing” this option and continues to hold talks with Meta, and has asked the company to provide evidence of the new option’s impact.“This isn’t just about a fine; the Commission forcing us to change our business model effectively imposes a multi-billion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service,” Kaplan said. “And by unfairly restricting personalized advertising the European Commission is also hurting European businesses and economies.” Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
As the founder of World Central Kitchen, renowned chef and humanitarian José Andrés has truly mastered the art of leading through crisis. Andrés shares insights from his new book, Change the Recipea candid collection of personal stories that doubles as a playbook for navigating uncertainty, breaking rules, and leading with heart. José also explores how AI is poised to reshape the food industry and more. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. One of the book’s key themes is adaptability, right? Yeah. For many people, especially today, things feel very volatile. There can be panic, there could be paralysis. How do you center yourself in those moments and how much do you think adaptability is about temperament versus something we can learn? I think the human DNA of who we are, we are a species that we are highly adaptable. We are not adaptable with our bodies, meaning evolution happens over hundreds of thousands, millions of years, but our brain can and our heart can. Once you find out what something is, your heart adapts and we change. You talk in the book about breaking rules and that you need to break rules to make progress. Yeah. Obviously, that one can be used in many ways because you could argue that rules are being broken right now in our government. I want to ask you because you’re in favor of rule-breaking sometimes to get certain things done, right? Let me tell you: It’s like when you show up somewhere and somebody comes and tells you that you are not needed here and you’re looking around and you are only seeing hunger, destruction. I’m sorry, but I want to be respectful, but if I see that there’s need, we’re going to stay here because our mission is not going to be following your guidance. It’s going to be following what the people are telling us. And so this is a way of breaking rules. We were told sometimes in some hurricanes in America that some schools, we couldn’t use the kitchens, and the school kitchen was the best kitchen in many kilometers around and was complicated to navigate through roads and destruction, and even we were told we couldn’t use that kitchen. We used that kitchen. We got in trouble. We got in trouble until, “Oh, you are feeding 2,000 people every day?” I think that’s a rule that I will not mind to pay a penalty or even be sent to jail. Right. You’re okay if you pay a penalty for breaking those rules because the goal is important enough. That’s what breaking the rules means. Sometimes the rules are in your own brain. It’s breaking the chains of the own rules that you set on your own that don’t allow you to do the extra step to make something happen. Sometimes they’re rules then, they’re not really rules. You’ve just taken them as rules. I want to ask you, there’s something else you write about in the book, the difference between thinking like software and thinking like hardware. Can you explain what that is? Yeah. Well, obviously, this is one that in emergencies I learned a long time ago. Very often in emergencies, you can hear presidents, “We are positioning military or helicopters or boats or food or armories or water or ambulances.” Okay. All of that is hardware. The hardware are tools, things that will allow you to have a good response. Everybody’s going to be working on bringing the hardware to ground zero. A week later, two weeks later, you are still in the business of being a transportation company, trying to move hardware from point A to ground zero. All of a sudden, you forgot who you were. Who you were: a feeding organization. Software will allow you to respond to your main mission, which is feeding people on day one. What software is, what do you have around to feed people? What is at your finger points today? Ain’t going to be perfect. Ain’t going to be pretty. You’re not going to have logos. It’s not going to be perfect. Maybe tamales in a banana leaf because it’s the only thing we have. We don’t even have forks and knives, but that allows you to give to somebody a piece of food that actually you can be holding in your hands and you are feeding day one in the heart of Puerto Rico with nothing. So that’s the hardware versus software. Never forget your mission, never forget what you’re there for. Every organization has to be clear what your mission is to the most simplistic, smaller phrase possible, and never let anybody forget that. If not, your mission becomes something else. Concentrating on the software will always allow you to be faster and quicker. As you’re talking about technology, I recently did an episode with Marc Lore, the founder of Wonder, the food delivery app. I know you’ve collaborated with Wonder. And Marc talked about how he uses AI to pick all of his meals, like every meal, and he thinks one day everybody’s going to do that and you’re even going to use it at a restaurant to pick your meals for you. Has he talked to you about this? Have you tried it? Do you think this is a good thing? Anything Marc says, I will support because Marc is one of those amazing brains. Obviously, he’s working on taxis that will lift up in the middle of the cities, planes that will fly us away. And obviously, Wonder I know very well. I’m on their board. The big thing for me and AI is when I tell AI, “What are the food problems and food solutions in America and planet Earth?” And AI right now, the best it can do is give you a very good glimpse of all the different situations food is a problem and can be a solution . . . Things people don’t even imagine. But food is everything. Food is national security, food is defense, food is immigration, food is science, food is health, food is the economy. Food is very much in everything, and we don’t even realize. We only have food on planet Earth for around six, seven weeks, no more; 90 days is the total food that we have stored to feed the eight billion people on planet Earth. If a major thing will happen at once, and it’s been glimpses in the past that we had back-to-back hurricanes in high productive food areas of America, Central America, tornadoes, droughts, pests wiping out food production, wiping out cattle, wiping out eggs, wiping out chickens. Imagine if the perfect storm happens. We have enough food to eat on planet Earth. Why are we not finding the way to make sure that those people that are really poor, we distribute that excess of food through better distribution, et cetera? That’s the problem now. We have enough, but not everybody is receiving the food, and we should be solving this problem. I believe it’s highly solvable. So obviously, if Marc is saying, “This is the way,” I will listen to Marc because we need more brains like Marc solving prolems, and it doesn’t seem we have the people or the experts concentrated in what can become a very big problem not too far away from today.
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