International Cooperation to Counter Migrant Smuggling and Human Trafficking through Special Investigative Techniques

The adoption of international coordination measures to spread the use of ‘special investigative techniques’ to combat organised crime effectively is encouraged by Article 20 of the UNTOC. This article discusses, firstly, the main features of ‘undercover operations’ involving, or taking place in, more than one State. It then examines the Italian implementation legal framework, as amended by a new law passed in 2019, seeking to establish whether and to what extent Italy is complying with its international commitments in this field.

ESG push will help improve diversity in US companies

Significance Policy, disclosure requirements and stakeholder pressures, particularly from investors, push them in that direction. The exception is diversity and inclusion, which form part of corporate responses to the competition for talent and labour market tightness. Rebalancing environmental, social and governance (ESG) progress requires realigning the incentives. Impacts Efforts will intensify for international coordination on ESG reporting standards and auditing. Executive compensation will increasingly be linked to meeting ESG goals but this will need close investor scrutiny of authenticity. If banks expand sustainability loans beyond green projects, it will mitigate corporate prioritisation of environmental over other ESG aims.

Ecuador prison crisis threatens to escalate

Significance The attack, which involved drones, illustrates the evolving tactics of crime groups, and follows a string of violent, sometimes coordinated, incidents at prisons this year. These have resulted in the deaths of over 120 inmates. Prison violence comes alongside rising crime and growing concerns over the strengthening of transnational drug cartels. Impacts Lasso will face increasing pressure from international human rights groups to protect prisoners and improve prison conditions. Rising violence and crime will increase concerns among international investors about the security of investments and risks of extortion. Lasso might seek to exploit improved relations with the US and Colombian governments to strengthen international coordination.

Towards advancing scientific knowledge of climate change impacts on short-duration rainfall extremes

A large number of recent studies have aimed at understanding short-duration rainfall extremes, due to their impacts on flash floods, landslides and debris flows and potential for these to worsen with global warming. This has been led in a concerted international effort by the INTENSE Crosscutting Project of the GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Exchanges) Hydroclimatology Panel. Here, we summarize the main findings so far and suggest future directions for research, including: the benefits of convection-permitting climate modelling; towards understanding mechanisms of change; the usefulness of temperature-scaling relations; towards detecting and attributing extreme rainfall change; and the need for international coordination and collaboration. Evidence suggests that the intensity of long-duration (1 day+) heavy precipitation increases with climate warming close to the Clausius–Clapeyron (CC) rate (6–7% K −1 ), although large-scale circulation changes affect this response regionally. However, rare events can scale at higher rates, and localized heavy short-duration (hourly and sub-hourly) intensities can respond more strongly (e.g. 2 × CC instead of CC). Day-to-day scaling of short-duration intensities supports a higher scaling, with mechanisms proposed for this related to local-scale dynamics of convective storms, but its relevance to climate change is not clear. Uncertainty in changes to precipitation extremes remains and is influenced by many factors, including large-scale circulation, convective storm dynamics andstratification. Despite this, recent research has increased confidence in both the detectability and understanding of changes in various aspects of intense short-duration rainfall. To make further progress, the international coordination of datasets, model experiments and evaluations will be required, with consistent and standardized comparison methods and metrics, and recommendations are made for these frameworks. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes and implications for flash flood risks’.

Anti-science kills: From Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to accelerated attacks on US biomedicine

The United States witnessed an unprecedented politicization of biomedical science starting in 2015 that has exploded into a complex, multimodal anti-science empire operating through mass media, political elections, legislation, and even health systems. Anti-science activities now pervade the daily lives of many Americans, and threaten to infect other parts of the world. We can attribute the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from COVID-19, measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases to anti-science. The acceleration of anti-science activities demands not only new responses and approaches but also international coordination. Vaccines and other biomedical advances will not be sufficient to halt COVID-19 or future potentially catastrophic illnesses, unless we simultaneously counter anti-science aggression.