Brno, Czech Republic
CNN
 — 

From the street, it doesn’t look like anything special.

Most tourists trying to find this UNESCO World Heritage site are usually looking for a grand European classical villa, so they often walk right past what they think is just a typical family home in a quiet Czech neighborhood.

But this deceptively humble house is studied by architects and historians around the world.

It has been a private residence, a dance studio, a recovery center for women with osteological conditions, a property owned by the Nazi Germany and the location for a major 20th century historical event.

Welcome to Villa Tugendhat.

In the 1920s, the Tugendhats, a wealthy German Jewish family, hired an up-and-coming architect named Mies van der Rohe — widely credited with popularizing the phrase “less is more” — to design their home in Brno.

It was completed in 1930, shortly before Hitler rose to power in Germany.

And all of those lost tourists can take comfort in the fact that Van der Rohe intended for the house to blend in with the neighborhood.

To truly see what’s special about the villa, you need to view it from the back. It was built on the top of a small hill, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that gave residents an uninterrupted view of the grassy landscape.

“(Van der Rohe) was, despite his very bourgeois appearance, a radical thinker,” says Dietrich Neumann, who teaches the history of architecture at Brown University. “He radically rethought the way people might want to live.”

At the time, most family houses were comprised of a series of boxy rooms with express purposes: one for cooking, one for sleeping, etc. But the Villa Tugendhat has large, shared spaces made of novel-for-the-time materials like white onyx. (A single wall of onyx would cost about $60,000 in today’s money.)

“You just flow between the rooms, and that was very antithetical to the German idea that you had to have closed cozy spaces inside,” says Michael Lambek.

Lambek’s mother Hanna was the only child of matriarch Grete Tugendhat’s first marriage and spent her early years living in the villa. Lambek grew up in Canada and published the book “Behind the Glass: The Villa Tugendhat and Its Family” in 2022.

“There was nothing left to chance,” he says about the home’s design.

“The house does not rest on its walls. It rests on steel pillars that have chrome wrapped around them. And the walls, at least on one side of the house, were replaced by windows. It was the first house to have plate glass, wall-to-wall, or ceiling-to-floor windows.”

Throughout the house, Van der Rohe and his collaborator Lilly Reich designed custom furniture that fit with the villa’s modern aesthetic. Two pieces were so iconic they became known as “the Brno chair” and “the Tugendhat chair” and are still produced under license today.

Rather than hanging up family portraits, fine art or ornate tapestries as many wealthy families did at the time, the Tugendhats opted to keep the interiors minimalist.

The glass windows provided not only lots of natural light but a look at the changing landscapes, while a large section of one floor has an indoor winter garden.

Neumann calls this concept “radical emptiness.”

“There was no inherited furniture from the parents,” he says. “There were no paintings on the walls. There were no Persian rugs that you brought from some exotic trip. There’s almost no belongings that are there to show off your personal history or your sentimental memories.”

Due to World War II and its aftereffects, the villa was only used as a family home for a short time.

The Tugendhats began to feel the waves of anti-Semitism growing in Europe and fled to Venezuela. The villa, as one of the largest properties in Brno, was seized by Nazi Germany. Later, after Brno was liberated by the Russians, the home passed through multiple owners and uses until the 1960s, when the family was able to return to Brno.

After the war, the Tugendhats settled in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. Grete Tugendhat was able to visit the villa again during the brief break from Soviet control during the Prague Spring, before it was crushed in August 1968 when the Soviet Union and its allies invaded. Grete Tugendhat agreed to give up her ownership claim to the home under two conditions: it be restored to its original condition, and it be open to the public. The city of Brno said yes.

In the meantime, Van der Rohe had emigrated to the United States and become one of the most famous architects in the world. He designed Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, the Seagram Building in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

The restoration work at Villa Tugendhat was slow and careful. In the decades between the war and the villa’s reopening as a tourist attraction, the Czech government used it as a “hospitality center,” hosting foreign dignitaries.

But its most famous historical happening took place with relatively little fanfare.

On August 26, 1992, two men, Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar, walked into the Villa Tugendhat.

That day, the two leaders agreed to split Czechoslovakia into two countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Brno, located roughly midway between Prague and Bratislava, was chosen as a symbolic location.

In the Villa Tugendhat garden, in what is now referred to as “the meeting under the tree,” the two men addressed reporters and announced that the two countries would be split as of January 1, 1993.

The peaceful separation, which did not involve any battles or bloodshed, is called the Velvet Divorce.

In 2001, UNESCO nadded the Villa Tugendhat to the World Heritage List, citing it as a “a pioneering work of modern 20th century residential architecture.”

CNN
 — 

The world is betting heavily on carbon capture — a term that refers to various techniques to stop carbon pollution from being released during industrial processes, or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, to then lock it up permanently.

The practice is not free of controversy, with some arguing that carbon capture is expensive, unproven and can serve as a distraction from actually reducing carbon emissions. But it is a fast-growing reality: there are at least 628 carbon capture and storage projects in the pipeline around the world, with a 60% year-on-year increase, according to the latest report from the Global CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) Institute. The market size was just over $3.5 billion in 2024, but is projected to grow to $14.5 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.

Perhaps the most ambitious — and the most expensive — type of carbon capture involves removing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air, although there are just a few such facilities currently in operation worldwide. Some scientists believe that a better option would be to capture carbon from seawater rather than air, because the ocean is the planet’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

In the UK, where the government in 2023 announced up to £20 billion ($26.7 billion) in funding to support carbon capture, one such project has taken shape near the English Channel. Called SeaCURE, it aims to find out if sea carbon capture actually works, and if it can be competitive with its air counterpart.

“The reason why sea water holds so much carbon is that when you put CO2 into the water, 99% of it becomes other forms of dissolved carbon that don’t exchange with the atmosphere,” says Paul Halloran, a professor of Ocean and Climate Science at the University of Exeter, who leads the SeaCURE team.

“But it also means it’s very straightforward to take that carbon out of the water.”

SeaCURE started building a pilot plant about a year ago, at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre on the southern coast of England. Operational for the past few months, it is designed to process 3,000 liters of seawater per minute and remove an estimated 100 tons of CO2 per year.

“We wanted to test the technology in the real environment with real sea water, to identify what problems you hit,” says Halloran, adding that working at a large public aquarium helps because it already has infrastructure to extract seawater and then discharge it back into the ocean.

The carbon that is naturally dissolved in the seawater can be easily converted to CO2 by slightly increasing the acidity of the water. To make it come out, the water is trickled over a large surface area with air blowing over it. “In that process, we can constrict over 90% of the carbon out of that water,” Halloran says.

The CO2 that is extracted from the water is run through a purification process that uses activated carbon in the form of charred coconut husks, and is then ready to be stored. In a scaled up system, it would be fed into geological CO2 storage. Before the water is released, its acidity is restored to normal levels, making it ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air.

“This discharged water that now has very low carbon concentrations needs to refill it, so it’s just trying to suck CO2 from anywhere, and it sucks it from the atmosphere,” says Halloran. “A simple analogy is that we’re squeezing out a sponge and putting it back.”

While more tests are needed to understand the full potential of the technology, Halloran admits that it doesn’t “blow direct air capture out the water in terms of the energy costs,” and there are other challenges such as having to remove impurities from the water before releasing it, as well as the potential impact on ecosystems. But, he adds, all carbon capture technologies incur high costs in building plants and infrastructure, and using seawater has one clear advantage: It has a much higher concentration of carbon than air does, “so you should be able to really reduce the capital costs involved in building the plants.”

One major concern with any system that captures carbon from seawater is the impact of the discharged water on marine ecosystems. Guy Hooper, a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, who’s working on this issue at the SeaCURE site, says that low-carbon seawater is released in such small quantities that it is unlikely to have any effect on the marine environment, because it dilutes extremely quickly.

However, that doesn’t mean that SeaCURE is automatically safe. “To understand how a scaled-up version of SeaCURE might affect the marine environment, we have been conducting experiments to measure how marine organisms respond to low-carbon seawater,” he adds. “Initial results suggest that some marine organisms, such as plankton and mussels, may be affected when exposed to low-carbon seawater.”

To mitigate potential impacts, the seawater can be “pre-diluted” before releasing it into the marine environment, but Hooper warns that a SeaCURE system should not be deployed near any sensitive marine habitats.

There is rising interest in carbon capture from seawater — also known as Direct Ocean Capture or DOC — and several startups are operating in the field. Among them is Captura, a spin off from the California Institute of Technology that is working on a pilot project in Hawaii, and Amsterdam-based Brineworks, which says that its method is more cost-effective than air carbon capture.

According to Stuart Haszeldine, a professor of Carbon Capture and Storage at the University of Edinburgh, who’s not involved with SeaCURE, although the initiative appears to be more energy efficient than current air capture pilot tests, a full-scale system will require a supply of renewable energy and permanent storage of CO2 by compressing it to become a liquid and then injecting it into porous rocks deep underground.

He says the next challenge is for SeaCURE to scale up and “to operate for longer to prove it can capture millions of tons of CO2 each year.”

But he believes there is huge potential in recapturing carbon from ocean water. “Total carbon in seawater is about 50 times that in the atmosphere, and carbon can be resident in seawater for tens of thousands of years, causing acidification which damages the plankton and coral reef ecosystems. Removing carbon from the ocean is a giant task, but essential if the consequences of climate change are to be controlled,” he says.

Washington
AP
 — 

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to restore $12 million that Congress appropriated for Radio Free Europe, a pro-democracy media outlet at risk of going dark for the first time in 75 years.

US District Judge Royce Lamberth also tucked a lesson on the three branches of government inside Tuesday’s ruling, cautioning that the system of checks and balances established by the US Constitution must remain intact if the nation is going to continue to thrive.

Lamberth granted the temporary restraining order for the US Agency for Global Media to disburse money for April 2025 for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty pending the outcome of a lawsuit seeking to keep the station on the air. He said the Trump administration could not unilaterally revoke funding approved by Congress.

“In interviews, podcasts, and op-eds, people from both inside and outside government have variously accused the courts — myself included — of fomenting a constitutional crisis, usurping the Article II powers of the Presidency, undercutting the popular will, or dictating how Executive agencies can and should be run,” wrote Lamberth, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

Those notions reflect a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the role of the federal judiciary and of the Constitution itself, he said.

“Reasonable people can reach different conclusions in complicated legal disputes such as this,” Lamberth wrote, and that’s why the appellate courts exist. The administration could also ask Congress to pull back the funds, he noted.

Attorneys for the media outlet say President Donald Trump’s administration has terminated nearly all of its contracts with freelance journalists, missed payments on leases and furloughed 122 employees. They warn that more employees will be furloughed and more contracts will be canceled on May 1 if funding isn’t restored.

“By the end of May, RFE/RL will be forced to cancel the contracts supporting its core live news broadcasting and reporting operations. In June 2025, RFE/RL will almost entirely cease its operations,” plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.

Government attorneys argued that the judge doesn’t have jurisdiction over what amounts to a contract dispute that belongs in the Court of Federal Claims.

“Plaintiff seeks to place this Court as the arbiter of the grant agreement terms between the parties. But doing so would put the Court in an improper policymaking role,” they wrote.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty started broadcasting during the Cold War. Its programs are aired in 27 languages in 23 countries across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. Its corporate headquarters are in Washington; its journalistic headquarters are based in the Czech Republic.

The Trump administration has tried to make deep cuts at other government-operated, pro-democracy media outlets, including Voice of America.

On April 22, however, Lamberth agreed to block the administration from dismantling Voice of America. The judge ruled that the administration illegally required Voice of America to cease operations for the first time since its World War II-era inception.

Congress makes the laws, but they must be signed by the president to take effect, Lamberth wrote in Tuesday’s ruling, and that’s exactly what happened in March when Trump signed the continuing resolution that allocated the grant funding to the government-operated media outlets.

Federal judges take an oath to render their decisions impartially, and Lamberth said he doesn’t have a stake in the outcome of this case. He also said he doesn’t have any animosity toward the president nor loyalty to the media outlets.

But the role of the courts is to interpret the laws of the Constitution and declare what the law is, he said – and unlike the executive branch, the courts have no means to independently enforce those laws.

By issuing the ruling, “I am humbly fulfilling my small part in this very constitutional paradigm – a framework that has propelled the United States to heights of greatness, liberty and prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world for nearly 250 years,” Lamberth wrote. “If our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders.”