OMAN: The Gulf of Oman turns green twice a year, when an algae bloom the size of Mexico spreads across the Arabian Sea all the way to India.
Scientists who study the algae say the microscopic organisms are thriving in new conditions brought about by climate change, and displacing the zooplankton that underpin the local food chain, threatening the entire marine ecosystem.
Khalid Al-Hashmi, a marine biologist at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, wrinkles his nose as the research vessel nears the bloom. “Sea stench,” he says, referring to the algae’s ammonia secretions. “It’s here, you can smell it.”
He signals the boat to stop as it speeds beneath a gigantic rock arch off the coast of Muscat, the capital of Oman, an arid sultanate on the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The captain kills the engine and drops anchor into a slick of bright green muck surrounded by crystal-clear blue water.
The swarms of microscopic creatures beneath the surface of the Gulf of Oman were all but invisible 30 years ago — now they form giant, murky shapes that can be seen from satellites.
Across the planet, blooms have wrecked local ecosystems. Algae can paralyze fish, clog their gills, and absorb enough oxygen to suffocate them. Whales, turtles, dolphins and manatees have died, poisoned by algal toxins, in the Atlantic and Pacific. These toxins have infiltrated whole marine food chains and have, in rare cases, killed people, according to the UN science agency.
In the Great Lakes of North America, Thailand and the Seychelles, the algae bloom green. In Florida they are red, in the North Atlantic they are chalky white, and in Puget Sound they are orange. The Irish call it the “sea ghost,” and the Taiwanese refer to the blooms as “blue tears.”
NASA uses satellites and floating robots to monitor the blooms, said Paula Bontempi, the manager for ocean carbon and biology projects at the US space agency. “It’s like a Van Gogh painting,” she said, referring to satellite images of swirls of chlorophyll spiraling across the world’s oceans. “Absolutely beautiful.”
It’s less attractive up close, where it can be “almost guacamole-like” in some lakes. “It smells bad, it looks bad,” she said.
The satellite technology has enabled scientists to link the algae to higher levels of air and water pollution in recent decades, but Bontempi said questions remain. “We know that our Earth is changing,” she said. “It may be in a direction we might not like.”
Scientists based at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University trace Oman’s blooms to melting ice in the Himalayas. Less ice has raised temperatures in South Asia and strengthened the Indian Ocean’s southwest monsoon. As this weather front moves across the Arabian Sea every year, it churned up oxygen-poor water thick with nutrients that have fueled the rise of a 1.2-billion-year old algae called noctiluca scintillans.
For the past 15 years, observatory biogeochemist Joaquim Goes, Al-Hashmi and biological oceanographer Helga do Rosario Gomes have tracked blooms in the Arabian Sea using boats, satellites and remote sensors.
Goes said the blooms have caused a “short-circuiting of the food chain,” endangering other marine life.
“Normally these things happen slowly, usually we talk about tens of hundreds of years. Here it’s happening overnight,” he said. “The transformation is happening before our eyes.”
The algae blooms pose a number of threats to Oman, whose fishing and trading ships have plied these waters for centuries.
Thick blooms reduce visibility, making it difficult for divers to repair undersea gas infrastructure. It can also clog the intake pipes of the desalinization plants that produce up to 90 percent of the country’s fresh water.
Fishermen call Oman’s marine research center when they spot blooms.
Marine ecologist Ahmad Al-Alawi adds these reports to four decades of observations before comparing them with satellite images of the swirling chlorophyll. He says the blooms are growing bigger and lasting longer, displacing the zooplankton at the bottom of the local food chain.
The algae has attracted more whale sharks — a major draw for divers — but many tourists have canceled their trips at the sight of the green, murky waves, said Ollie Clarke, a dive instructor at the Bandar Al-Rowdah marina near Muscat.
It also poses a threat to the country’s fisheries. An outbreak of a different kind of algae in 2008 led to the beaching of 50 tons of oxygen-starved fish, which rotted up and down the coast, Al-Alawi said.
The researchers have found cause for both despair and hope by studying a live noctiluca culture in their lab: The blooms will likely spread as the Indian Ocean continues to absorb greenhouse gas emissions, but could be contained if they are sprayed with fresh water. Goes and Gomes hope to develop an early-warning system for Oman modeled on one operated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Florida
But Saleh Al-Mashari, who learned to sail and fish as a boy in the small coastal village where he still lives, and who now captains a researcher vessel, said the damage is already done.
“The fish are migrating,” he said. “They can’t get enough air here.”
Growing algae bloom in Arabian Sea tied to climate change
Growing algae bloom in Arabian Sea tied to climate change
19 arrested after Turkiye hotel inferno disaster
ANKARA: Turkish authorities have arrested 19 people as part of an investigation into a fire at a ski resort hotel that killed 78 people, Anadolu state news agency reported Monday.
Those detained include a deputy mayor for the town responsible for the Kartalkaya resort, a deputy fire chief and the head of another establishment belonging to the hotel owner, the agency said.
The investigation into the January 21 disaster has focused on the hotel management and the actions of the emergency services and authorities in the town of Bolu.
On Friday, the owner of the Grand Karta hotel, his son-in-law, the hotel’s chief electrician and its head chef were arrested.
Survivors and experts have highlighted the absence of fire alarms and sprinklers, working smoke detectors and proper fire escape routes at the 12-story building that overlooked the ski slopes.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has said 238 people were staying in the Grand Karta hotel when the inferno tore through the building in the middle of the night.
Palestinians return to north Gaza after breakthrough on hostages
- Israel and Hamas said they had reached a deal for the release of another six hostages
- Crowds began making their way north along a coastal road on foot Monday morning
NUSEIRAT, Palestinian Territories: Masses of displaced Palestinians began streaming toward the north of the war-battered Gaza Strip on Monday after Israel and Hamas said they had reached a deal for the release of another six hostages.
The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire and paves the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under an agreement aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents.
Israel had been preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the terms of the truce, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said late Sunday they would be allowed to pass after the new deal was reached.
Crowds began making their way north along a coastal road on foot Monday morning, carrying what belongings they could, AFPTV images showed.
“It’s a great feeling when you go back home, back to your family, relatives and loved ones, and inspect your house — if it is still a house,” displaced Gazan Ibrahim Abu Hassera said.
Hamas called the return “a victory” for Palestinians that “signals the failure and defeat of the plans for occupation and displacement.”
Its ally Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, called it a “response to all those who dream of displacing our people.”
The comments came after US President Donald Trump floated an idea to “clean out” Gaza and resettle Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt, drawing condemnation from regional leaders.
President Mahmud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, issued a “strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.
Trump had floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”
The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land,” saying their forced displacement could “only be called ethnic cleansing.”
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”
Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage to the north until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage who it maintained should have been freed on Saturday.
But Netanyahu’s office later said a deal had been reached for the release of three hostages on Thursday, including Yehud, as well as another three on Saturday.
Hamas confirmed the agreement in its own statement Monday.
During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held by the Israelis.
The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday in the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.
“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” said Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase.
The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
EU to agree easing Syria sanctions
- Europe is keen to help the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and build bridges with its new leadership
- But some EU countries worry about moving too fast to embrace the new Islamist-led rulers in Damascus
BRUSSELS: EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said she expected the bloc to agree Monday to begin easing sanctions on Syria after the ouster of Bashar Assad.
“It is a step for step approach,” Kallas said at the start of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels to discuss the move.
Europe is keen to help the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country and build bridges with its new leadership after the end of the Assad family’s five-decade rule.
But some EU countries worry about moving too fast to embrace the new Islamist-led rulers in Damascus.
The 27-nation EU imposed wide-ranging sanctions on the Assad government and Syria’s economy during its civil war.
Brussels says it is now willing to ease sanctions on the expectation the new authorities make good on commitments to form an inclusive transition.
“If they are doing the right steps, then we are willing to do the steps on our behalf as well,” Kallas said.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the EU could start by suspending sanctions on the energy, transport and banking sectors.
Diplomats say the EU will only suspend the sanctions and not lift them definitively to maintain leverage over the Syrian leadership.
Syria’s new de facto leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, and the Islamist group he led Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, remain under EU sanctions.
Diplomats said there was still no discussion about lifting those designations, as with others on the Assad regime.
Deal reached to release more Israeli hostages and allow Palestinians into north Gaza
- Netanyahu’s office says another six hostages to be released in coming week after talks with Hamas
- Israel confirms Qatar’s announcement, says Gazans can now return home from 7 a.m. Monday
DOHA/JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY: Mediator Qatar announced early Monday that an agreement has been reached to release an Israeli civilian hostage and allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, easing the first major crisis of the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Qatar’s statement said Hamas will hand over the civilian hostage, Arbel Yehoud, along with two other hostages before Friday. And on Monday, Israeli authorities will allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement said the hostage release — which will include soldier Agam Berger — will take place on Thursday, and confirmed that Palestinians can move north on Monday. Israel’s military said people can start crossing on foot at 7 a.m.
Under the ceasefire deal, Israel on Saturday was to begin allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza. But Israel put that on hold because of Yehoud, who Israel said should have been released on Saturday. Hamas accused Israel of violating the agreement.
Netanyahu's office said that another six hostages would be released in the coming week, after talks with Hamas. Three would be released on Thursday and another three on Saturday, said a statement from his office.
The breakthrough preserves a fragile ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, which has devastated the Gaza Strip and displaced nearly all its residents, paving the way for more hostage-prisoner swaps under a deal aimed at ending the more than 15-month conflict.
Israel had been preventing vast crowds of Palestinians from using a coastal road to return to northern Gaza, accusing Hamas of violating the truce agreement by failing to release civilian women hostages.
“Hamas has backtracked and will carry out an additional phase of releasing hostages this Thursday,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
Trump’s plan meets mixed reactions
Palestinian leaders meanwhile slammed a plan floated by US President Donald Trump to “clean out” Gaza, vowing to resist any effort to forcibly displace residents of the war-battered territory.
Trump said Gaza had become a “demolition site,” adding he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out.
“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump told reporters.
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects” aimed at displacing Palestinians from Gaza, his office said.
Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP that Palestinians would “foil such projects,” as they have done to similar plans “for displacement and alternative homelands over the decades.”
Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, called Trump’s idea “deplorable.”
For Palestinians, any attempt to move them from Gaza would evoke dark memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948.
“We say to Trump and the whole world: we will not leave Palestine or Gaza, no matter what happens,” said displaced Gaza resident Rashad Al-Naji.
Trump floated the idea to reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One: “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Moving Gaza’s roughly 2.4 million inhabitants could be done “temporarily or could be long term,” he said.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — who opposed the truce deal and has voiced support for re-establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza — called Trump’s suggestion of “a great idea.”
Tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’
The Arab League rejected the idea, warning against “attempts to uproot the Palestinian people from their land.”
“The forced displacement and eviction of people from their land can only be called ethnic cleansing,” the league said in a statement.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said “our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians.”
Egypt’s foreign ministry said it rejected any infringement of Palestinians’ “inalienable rights.”
In Gaza, cars and carts loaded with belongings jammed a road near the Netzarim Corridor that Israel has blocked, preventing the expected return of hundreds of thousands of people to northern Gaza.
Israel had said it would prevent Palestinians’ passage until the release of Arbel Yehud, a civilian woman hostage. She is among those slated for return on Thursday, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Hamas said that blocking returns to the north also amounted to a truce violation, adding it had provided “all the necessary guarantees” for Yehud’s release.
Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee said Monday that residents would be allowed to return on foot starting at 07 a.m. (0500 GMT) and by car at 9 a.m.
Staggered releases
During the first phase of the Gaza truce, 33 hostages are supposed to be freed in staggered releases over six weeks in exchange for around 1,900 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
The most recent swap saw four Israeli women hostages, all soldiers, and 200 prisoners, nearly all Palestinian, released Saturday — the second such exchange during the fragile truce entering its second week.
Dani Miran, whose hostage son Omri is not slated for release during the first phase, demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday.
“We want the agreement to continue and for them to bring our children back as quickly as possible — and all at once,” he said.
The truce has brought a surge of food, fuel, medicines and other aid into rubble-strewn Gaza, but the UN says “the humanitarian situation remains dire.”
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war, 87 remain in Gaza, including 34 the military says are dead.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
Bittersweet return for Syrians with killed, missing relatives
- “I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” says Wafa Mustafa, whose father Ali was among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system
DAMASCUS: Wafa Mustafa had long dreamed of returning to Syria but the absence of her father tarnished her homecoming more than a decade after he disappeared in Bashar Assad’s jails.
Her father Ali, an activist, is among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria’s notorious prison system, and whose relatives have flocked home in search of answers after Assad’s toppling last month by Islamist-led rebels.
“From December 8 until today, I have not felt any joy,” said Mustafa, 35, who returned from Berlin.
“I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful,” she said. “I walk down the street and remember that I had passed by that same corner with my dad” years before.
Since reaching Damascus she has scoured defunct security service branches, prisons, morgues and hospitals, hoping to glean any information about her long-lost father.
“You can see the fatigue on people’s faces” everywhere, said Mustafa, who works as a communications manager for the Syria Campaign, a rights group.
In 2021, she was invited to testify at the United Nations about the fate of Syria’s disappeared.
The rebels who toppled Assad freed thousands of detainees nearly 14 years into a civil war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.
Mustafa returned to Branch 215, one of Syria’s most notorious prisons run by military intelligence, where she herself had been detained simply for participating in pro-democracy protests in 2011.
She found documents there mentioning her father. “That’s already a start,” Mustafa said.
Now, she “wants the truth” and plans to continue searching for answers in Syria.
“I only dream of a grave, of having a place to go to in the morning to talk to my father,” she said. “Graves have become our biggest dream.”
In Damascus, Mustafa took part in a protest demanding justice for the disappeared and answers about their fate.
Youssef Sammawi, 29, was there too. He held up a picture of his cousin, whose arrest and beating in 2012 prompted Sammawi to flee for Germany.
A few years later, he identified his cousin’s corpse among the 55,000 images by a former military photographer codenamed “Caesar,” who defected and made the images public.
The photos taken between 2011 and 2013, authenticated by experts, show thousands of bodies tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.
“The joy I felt gave way to pain when I returned home, without being able to see my cousin,” Sammawi said.
He said his uncle had also been arrested and then executed after he went to see his son in the hospital.
“When I returned, it was the first time I truly realized that they were no longer there,” he said with sadness in his voice.
“My relatives had gotten used to their absence, but not me,” he added. “We demand that justice be served, to alleviate our suffering.”
While Assad’s fall allowed many to end their exile and seek answers, others are hesitant.
Fadwa Mahmoud, 70, told AFP she has had no news of her son and her husband, both opponents of the Assad government arrested upon arrival at Damascus airport in 2012.
She fled to Germany a year later and co-founded the Families For Freedom human rights group.
She said she has no plans to return to Syria just yet.
“No one really knows what might happen, so I prefer to stay cautious,” she said.
Mahmoud said she was disappointed that Syria’s new authorities, who pledged justice for victims of atrocities under Assad’s rule, “are not yet taking these cases seriously.”
She said Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa “has yet to do anything for missing Syrians,” yet “met Austin Tice’s mother two hours” after she arrived in the Syrian capital.
Tice is an American journalist missing in Syria since 2012.
Sharaa “did not respond” to requests from relatives of missing Syrians to meet him, Mahmoud said.
“The revolution would not have succeeded without the sacrifices of our detainees,” she said.