“The US often waits until the harm is done and the EU tries to prevent it to a certain extent. It often seems the US favors the market over protection.”

Compared with those who ate hardly any fish, the group that ate the most — on average 10 ounces, or about three servings, per week — had 22 percent more cases of malignant melanoma, the researchers found. It’s not clear why eating fish might affect a person’s risk of developing melanoma, said Eunyoung Cho, an associate professor of dermatology at Brown University and the lead author of the study. “We believe it’s not fish per se, but probably some contaminant in fish,” she said. Other studies have found that people who eat more fish have higher levels of heavy metals such as mercury and arsenic in the body. These same contaminants are also associated with a higher risk of skin cancer, she noted. However, her study didn’t measure contaminant levels in participants, and more research is needed to explore this link, she said.

Southern California officials on Tuesday took the unprecedented step of declaring a water shortage emergency and ordering outdoor usage be restricted to just one day a week for about 6 million people in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. The outdoor watering restrictions will take effect June 1 under the decision by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and will apply to areas that depend on water from the drought-ravaged State Water Project.

The bottles, which came from vineyards in the Napa Valley, contained Cabernet Sauvignon from the 2020 vintage. They had all been made from grapes harvested after the Glass Fire, a blaze that tore through Napa, burning almost 68,000 acres and turning the skies orange. Nearly 30 wineries were ravaged by fire, but far more difficult to gauge was the damage wrought by smoke — which can travel, unstoppable, over a larger swath of land and seep into any vineyard’s fruit. Oberholster, an exacting South African–born chemist at UC Davis’s Department of Viticulture and Enology, is the closest thing California has to an expert on smoke and wine, and after the fire died down, wineries began sending her clusters of grapes and samples of wine in the desperate hope that she could help them prepare for the next disaster.

Nine people were arrested by state wildlife police on suspicion of poaching, selling animals on the black market and other offenses after a sprawling investigation by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the agency said. “I am proud of the dedicated wildlife officers who spent countless hours investigating this wildlife trafficking case to protect our native sturgeon population, which is already severely affected by historic drought conditions,” David Bess, deputy director and chief of the law enforcement division, said in a release.