$2bn court award over Roundup: A defeat for glyphosate’s champions

Just as a jury in California awarded more than $2bn to a couple who claimed Bayer AG’s glyphosate-based Roundup caused their cancer on Monday, Victor Vescovo, a retired American naval officer, gave details of his submarine dive to one of the deepest known places on earth. Vescovo reported that when he dived 10,927 metres to a point in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench — 16m deeper than a record 1960 dive — he found man-made litter he believes may be plastic.

Though there is no connection between the weedkiller and the Mariana Trench discovery, each speaks to our poor, increasingly described as fatal, stewardship of the planet.