By SAM METZ, Associated Press

SMIMOU, Morocco (AP) — Argan oil runs through your fingers like liquid gold — hydrating, luscious, and restorative. Prized worldwide as a miracle cosmetic, it’s more than that in Morocco. It’s a lifeline for rural women and a byproduct of a forest slowly buckling under the weight of growing demand.

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To make it, women crouch over stone mills and grind down kernels. One kilogram — roughly two days of work — earns them around $3, enough for a modest foothold in an economy where opportunities are scarce. It also links them to generations past.

“We were born and raised here. These traditions come from nature, what our parents and grandparents have taught us and what we’ve inherited,” cooperative worker Fatma Mnir said.

Long a staple in local markets, argan oil today is in luxury hair and skin care products lining drugstore aisles worldwide. But its runaway popularity is threatening argan forests, with overharvesting piled on top of drought straining trees once seen as resilient in the harshest of conditions.

Hafida El Hantati, owner of one of the cooperatives that harvests the fruit and presses it for oil, said the stakes go beyond the trees, threatening cherished traditions.

“We must take care of this tree and protect it because if we lose it, we will lose everything that defines us and what we have now,” she said at the Ajddigue cooperative outside the coastal town of Essaouira.

A forest out of time

For centuries, argan trees have supported life in the arid hills between the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlas Mountains, feeding people and animals, holding soil in place and helping keep the desert from spreading.

The spiny trees can survive in areas with less than an inch of annual rain and heat up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). They endure drought with roots that stretch as far as 115 feet (35 meters) underground. Goats climb trees, chomp their fruit, and eventually disperse seeds as part of the forest’s regeneration cycle.

Moroccans stir the oil into nut butters and drizzle it over tagines. Rich in vitamin E, it’s lathered onto dry hair and skin to plump, moisturize and stave off damage. Some use it to calm eczema or heal chicken pox.

But the forest has thinned. Trees bear fewer fruit, their branches gnarled from thirst. In many places, cultivated land has replaced them as fields of citrus and tomatoes, many grown for export, have expanded.

Communities once managed forests collectively, setting rules for grazing and harvesting. Now the system is fraying, with theft routinely reported.

What’s wrong with the forest

But a forest that covered about 5,405 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) at the turn of the century has shrunk by 40%. Scientists warn that argan trees are not invincible.

“Because argan trees acted as a green curtain protecting a large part of southern Morocco against the encroaching Sahara, their slow disappearance has become considered as an ecological disaster,” said Zoubida Charrouf, a chemist who researches argan at Université Mohammed V in Rabat.

Shifting climate is a part of the problem. Fruit and flowers sprout earlier each year as rising temperatures push the seasons out of sync.

Goats that help spread seeds can be destructive, too, especially if they feed on seedlings before they mature. Overgrazing has become worse as herders and fruit collectors fleeing drier regions encroach on plots long allocated to specific families.

The forests also face threats from camels bred and raised by the region’s wealthy. Camels stretch their necks into trees and chomp entire branches, leaving lasting damage, Charrouf said.

Liquid gold, dry pockets

Today, women peel, crack and press argan for oil at hundreds of cooperatives. Much makes its way through middlemen to be sold in products by companies and subsidiaries of L’Oréal, Unilever, and Estée Lauder.

But workers say they earn little while watching profits flow elsewhere. Cooperatives say much of the pressure stems from climbing prices. A 1-liter bottle sells for 600 Moroccan dirhams ($60), up from 25 dirhams ($2.50) three decades ago. Products infused with argan sell for even more abroad. Cosmetics companies call argan the most expensive vegetal oil on the market.

The coronavirus pandemic upended global demand and prices and many cooperatives closed. Cooperative leaders say new competitors have flooded the market just as drought has diminished how much oil can be squeezed from each fruit.

Cooperatives were set up to provide women a base pay and share profits each month. But Union of Women’s Argan Cooperatives President Jamila Id Bourrous said few make more than Morocco’s minimum monthly wage.

“The people who sell the final product are the ones making the money,” she said.

Some businesses say large multinational companies use their size to set prices and shut others out.

Khadija Saye, a co-owner of Ageourde Cooperative, said there were real fears about monopoly.

“Don’t compete with the poor for the one thing they live from,” she said. “When you take their model and do it better because you have money, it’s not competition, it’s displacement.”

One company, Olvea, controls 70% of the export market, according to data from local cooperatives. Cooperatives say few competitors can match its capacity to fill big orders for global brands. Representatives for the company did not respond to requests for comment.

Mounting challenges, limited solutions

On a hill overlooking the Atlantic, a government water truck weaves between rows of trees, pausing to hose saplings that have just started to sprout.

The trees are a project that Morocco began in 2018, planting 39 square miles (100 square kilometers) on private lands abutting the forests. To conserve water and improve soil fertility, argan trees alternate rows with capers, a technique known as intercropping.

The idea is to expand forest cover and show that argan, if properly managed, can be a viable source of income. Officials hope it will ease pressure on the overharvested commons and convince others to reinvest in the land. The trees were expected to begin producing this year but haven’t during a drought.

Another issue is the supply chain.

“Between the woman in the village and the final buyer, there are four intermediaries. Each takes a cut. The cooperatives can’t afford to store, so they sell cheap to someone who pays upfront,” Id Bourrous, the union president, said.

The government has attempted to build storage centers to help producers hold onto their goods longer and negotiate better deals. So far, cooperatives say it hasn’t worked, but a new version is expected in 2026 with fewer barriers to access.

Despite problems, there’s money to be made.

During harvest season, women walk into the forest with sacks, scanning the ground for fallen fruit. To El Hantati, the forest, once thick and humming with life, feels quieter now. Only the winds and creaking trees are audible as goats climb branches in search of remaining fruits and leaves.

“When I was young, we’d head into the forest at dawn with our food and spend the whole day gathering. The trees were green all year long,” she said.

She paused, worried about the future as younger generations pursue education and opportunities in larger cities.

“I’m the last generation that lived our traditions — weddings, births, even the way we made oil. It’s all fading.”

Islam Aatfaoui contributed reporting.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

“It’s not just about ordering mocktails!”

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That’s what Time Out magazine wants you to remember about sober traveling. While some folks prefer booze-soaked debauchery or ayahuasca retreats, other vacationers like to experience a fantastic hiking trail, a world-class museum or a transformative yoga class, and remember everything just fine the next day.

Based on research from Missouri treatment center Sana Lake Recovery, which considers things like access to nature, gyms, music venues and even AA meetings, Time Out has named the “10 best cities for sober travel in the U.S.” Two places in California make the list, Oakland (2) and San Francisco (10), with their Bay Area perks like “more than 300 hiking trails, 120 fitness studios and 33 different museums to stimulate your travel.” Oh, and “five mocktail bars and two gorgeous, restored movie palaces (the Fox and the Paramount) where you can take tours or see live shows.”

Here is where else in America you might want to visit in 2025, should you love to be alert and living the sober life:

Time Out’s 10 best cities for sober travel in the U.S. in 2025:

1 St. Louis, Missouri

2 Oakland, California

3 Portland, Oregon

4 Minneapolis, Minnesota

5 Seattle, Washington

6 Colorado Springs, Colorado

Sun rays break through the redwoods during a hike along French Loop Trail at the Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, April 21, 2023. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)

7 Tucson, Arizona

8 Miami, Florida

9 Tampa, Florida

10 San Francisco, California

Source: https://www.timeout.com/usa/news/these-are-the-10-best-cities-for-sober-travel-in-the-u-s-070225

During severe thunderstorms, rising air shoots icy pellets the size of Dippin’ Dots ice cream into the bitter cold of upper atmospheric layers. There, supercooled water freezes onto the small particles to form hail, which then falls when it gets too heavy for the storm’s upward draft.

As climate change warms average global temperatures, hailstones larger than pingpong or golf balls will become more frequent — likely worsening the weather hazard’s already billions of dollars in annual property damage across the country, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

“Climate change is obviously occurring,” said Victor Gensini, a meteorologist and professor of atmospheric science at Northern Illinois University who led the study. “The question, for scientists, is often: How does that manifest itself (in) these smaller-scale extreme weather perils?”

Insurance companies have reported rising hail damage claims from homeowners due to severe storms. In 2024, roof repair and replacement costs totaled nearly $31 billion across the country, up almost 30% from 2022, according to an April report from Verisk, a risk assessment and data analytics firm. Hail and wind accounted for more than half of all residential claims. 

State Farm is raising homeowners insurance rates in Illinois by 27.2% beginning Aug. 15, according to a filing with the state last month. The rate hike, one of the largest in the state’s history, will affect nearly 1.5 million policyholders. In addition, State Farm is implementing a minimum 1% deductible on all wind and hail losses, raising the out-of-pocket costs for homeowners filing a related damage claim.

State Farm said its Illinois homeowners business has seen “unsustainable” losses in 13 of the last 15 years and cited more frequent extreme weather events such as wind, hail and tornadoes, insufficient premiums to cover claims and the rising cost of repairs due to inflation.

Last year, State Farm customers in Illinois reported $638 million in hail damage, ranking the state second after Texas.

In May, roughly 100 researchers — including Gensini and other NIU scientists — kicked off the world’s largest-ever coordinated effort to study hail in and around the Central Plains. But “we will go wherever the storms are,” he said in a previous interview.

The work is being supported with $11 million from the National Science Foundation and aims to improve forecasts of severe, damaging hail using data collected through technology such as drones, weather balloons, meteorological instruments that measure hailstone size and strike impact, and more. Better detection and prediction would allow people to protect themselves, their property and their livelihoods, preventing millions of dollars in losses.

Between mid-May and the end of June, scientists tracked 28 hail events across 11 states in the Midwest, South and Mountain West. They recorded hail bigger than 3 inches in Colorado, Texas, Montana and South Dakota.

Forensic engineer Tim Marshall measures a large hailstone in the front seats of Northern Illinois University’s Husky Hail Hunter during a Project ICECHIP operation, June 6, 2025, in Morton, Texas. Project ICECHIP is made of teams from several universities observing storms from the inside and seeing how the hail forms. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Tony Illenden crouches outside Northern Illinois University’s Husky Hail Hunter to scoop hail into a bag while in a hailstorm during a Project ICECHIP operation, June 6, 2025, in Levelland, Texas. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Recent cuts to federal grants from the Trump administration have paused scientific endeavors in many areas, including weather forecasting, but organizers said the NIU-led study was not affected because funding was awarded last summer.

Northeast Illinois has had its share of big hail this year, too. An early spring thunderstorm produced tornadoes and dropped pea-size hail across the area in mid-March; the largest hailstones reported were as big as half dollars in central Cook County. On May 15, 3-inch hail was observed in Livingston County, and 2-inch hail was also reported in northeast Lake County. Batavia was pelted by hail as big as tennis balls during a June supercell.

According to the National Weather Service, for the last 30 years, the Chicago area has averaged 11 days of any size hail per year and two days of significant stones with diameters 2 inches or larger.

In their study, published in August 2024, NIU researchers found that days with severe hailstorms with larger stones will increase most significantly in the Midwest, Ohio Valley and Northeast by at least five days from mid- to late-century.

“Depending on how hard you press the gas pedal — the gas pedal being human emissions of CO2 — that has a really big impact on hail that we see and, ultimately, where it occurs,” Gensini said. “On average, we see bigger hail, more frequent bigger hail, and we actually see less small hail.”

Using a model with high-resolution mapping offered researchers new, more granular insights into the future of individual storms and their hazards compared with the data that traditional global models produce, which Gensini characterized as coarse and grainy.

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“It would be like the difference of a cellphone camera from back in the early 2000s compared to what we have now,” said Jeff Trapp, professor of climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

According to Gensini, a warmer climate concentrates more water vapor in the atmosphere, which in turn fuels thunderstorms and makes them more robust — with stronger updrafts that can suspend bigger hailstones.

“Take a hair dryer and turn it up on end, so it’s blowing air straight up,” he said. “It’s pretty easy to suspend a pingpong ball right above that hair dryer. But now, what if you wanted to suspend a grapefruit or a soccer ball? You’re going to need a much stronger updraft.”

Warmer temperatures in the lower atmosphere would also melt smaller hailstones that fall at a slower speed, while really big stones would remain relatively unaffected.

Project ICECHIP members from Northern Illinois University Evelynn Mantia, left, and Olivena Carlisle, lower right, inflate a weather balloon with a radiosonde attached to collect data, June 4, 2025, during a hail study in Tucumcari, New Mexico. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

The model used in the study indicated a more than 25% increase in the frequency of large hailstones of at least 1.8 inches if planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from human activities do not significantly reduce by mid-century. In that same scenario, stones larger than 2 inches could increase by over 75% by the end of the century, and there would be fewer hailstones smaller than a golf ball, or 1.7 inches.

The National Weather Service considers severe any hail bigger than a quarter or with more than a 1-inch diameter. Anything larger than 2 inches can easily damage roads, dent cars and shred crops. Stones larger than 4 inches are called giant hail, and those larger than 6 inches are called gargantuan hail.

Theoretically, the maximum size could be over 9 inches in diameter, like a bowling ball. The largest recorded hailstone in the country fell on June 23, 2010, in Vivian, South Dakota. It had an 8-inch diameter and weighed 1 pound and 15 ounces. The largest hailstone reported in Illinois was about 4.75 inches, the size of a softball, and fell on June 10, 2015, near the village of Minooka, 50 miles southwest of Chicago.

Having researched severe storms, their hazards and their connection with climate change for decades, the U. of I.’s Trapp emphasized the need to study potential changes in hail’s seasonality, too — even though “there’s not really a hail season, but there are times of the year that are more conducive to (it).”

In Illinois, that’s typically during the spring and early summer.

“This is an important question, I think, ultimately, to address,” he said. “For people who do emergency management, as an example, so that they know that in the coming years, maybe the coming decades, there might be an expectation that their activity will be enhanced during an earlier or different time of the year. And we’re seeing that with severe weather in general.”

No matter the changes in hail size and frequency, the NIU researchers noted that the effects of this weather hazard — mainly in the form of losses and damages — will only grow as an increasingly urbanized landscape leaves more people and their property vulnerable to the pelting stones.

Gensini called hail an understudied, “underappreciated” storm peril. According to Verisk, noncatastrophic wind and hail roof claims increased from 17% to 25% between 2022 and 2024, which the company says highlights the growing impact of these perils despite the greater focus often placed on catastrophic events.

“Tornadoes are incredibly dramatic; they can produce casualties and fatalities. You generally just don’t see that with hail; (stones have) impacts (on) assets and structures, and not necessarily people or their livelihood. But the trade-off of that is hail is way more frequent, way more common,” Gensini said. “And because of that frequency, we see way more damage and way more impact, in terms of insured losses from hail, every single year.”

adperez@chicagotribune.com

When Jennifer Hughes’ son was in a mountain biking accident last year, she was prepared to go into full “mama bear” mode, overseeing his medical care and insurance details.

But the Chicago-area mom ran into repeated roadblocks — federal privacy laws — that turned an already stressful time into a nightmare.

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Her son, Vance Hughes, had recently turned 18, meaning she no longer had unfettered access to his medical records or his health insurance and financial information.

“It really got me thinking, ‘Gosh, what are we going to do if something happens when he’s at college and he needs our support? Will we be able to give it to him legally?’” Jennifer Hughes said. “I know it sounds crazy, but that was a concern.”

Hughes’ fears were quelled by a company with a name that resonated: Mama Bear Legal Forms. For under $100, college-bound kids can sign privacy waivers, granting their parents access to their medical records and educational information, including grades.

Technological advances have increasingly given parents the ability to track their children’s locations and technology usage. Mama Bear taps into a market of parents accustomed to this vigilance who realize their access changes when their kids turn 18 and are subject to medical- and student-privacy laws.

Mama Bear’s website provides a bundle of health and financial power-of-attorney forms, a release waiving the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, which prevents parents from accessing their child’s educational records once they turn 18, and a release waiving the student’s federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, medical-privacy rights.

Representatives of the Nebraska-based company did not respond to interview requests.

Mama Bear, which is not a law firm and doesn’t offer legal advice, markets itself as a solution for anxious parents to “feel confident knowing you can support your college-bound child.”

“It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind,” said Ruth Epps, a Littleton mom whose son at the University of Colorado Boulder signed Mama Bear legal forms.

Chatter about Mama Bear’s services pops up every few weeks in CU-related Facebook groups, where parents crowdsource questions about their children’s dorm-room assignments, ask where they can order soup for a sick kid, and find out which classes are best.

Parents on Facebook wrote that their social media feeds were filled with Mama Bear ads and posts wanting to know more from families who have used the services. Others replied that the company’s offerings felt like the answer to a problem they didn’t know they had yet.

It was a problem Hughes knew intimately. The professional blogger at mommyevolution.com said her son’s mountain biking accident opened her eyes to an issue that hadn’t been on her radar.

Vance Hughes is headed to CU Boulder this fall to study psychology — and ski in his downtime.

When his mom approached him about signing the Mama Bear documents to give her access to his health, financial and educational records, he said it was a no-brainer.

He knew the trouble his mom had been through dealing with his insurance after his biking accident and wanted to prevent that headache while allowing his parents more control over his medical decisions should an emergency happen again.

“The biggest thing for me is my mom can still hold my hand and help me through my formative years of becoming an adult as long as I need help in the future,” Vance Hughes said. “I don’t see the harm in it.”

Vance Hughes said he has a great relationship with his mom. He couldn’t imagine her using her new legal access to pry into his life willy-nilly.

“She’ll probably only look if I’m really, really struggling, and that will allow her to be like, ‘What can I do to help you?’” he said.

Jennifer Hughes agreed. Her son knows she wouldn’t misuse her new power, she said, and she knows he would willingly discuss his grades without her having to snoop.

“You think about your kid being an adult, but he’s still your kid, and they may need your assistance,” she said. “It’s not about making sure you keep a thumb on them. It’s that in case of an emergency, you can support them in the best way they need. He’s going to college to be his own person, and this is a great place for him to start learning how to adult.”

‘A one-size-fits-all approach’

Jennifer Hendricks, a CU Boulder law professor and co-director of the Juvenile and Family Law Program, wasn’t as sold on Mama Bear Legal Forms.

It wasn’t so much the medical directive or health care power of attorney that concerned her, although she noted it was more likely a parent would need those forms for themselves than for their children.

What worried Hendricks was what she described as fear-based marketing and a potential overreach in signing away students’ FERPA and HIPAA rights.

These forms go beyond allowing parents to have a say if a medical emergency strikes, she said. They could inform mom and dad that their child is talking to a therapist, taking birth control or going to the health center for a nasty hangover, Hendricks said.

“What I’m seeing is really infantilizing the adult children by having the mom prepare everything and then just say ‘sign this,’” Hendricks said.

Colorado-based family law attorney Rich Harris said he’s had conversations with his own family about whether they should consider some of these legal forms for their college-aged children. He advised talking to legal experts rather than outsourcing to a one-size-fits-all internet option.

“There’s a trend in these do-it-yourself legal form companies,” Harris said. “I’ve been cautioning people for years to be very, very careful about them because they purport to give you a one-size-fits-all approach for a super low fee and offer very little legal customization.”

Plus, Hendricks said, there are existing, free medical and university release forms allowing students to decide which parts of their lives their parents can access. For example, university FERPA waivers allow parents and kids to sign off on parents having access to their students’ financial information — useful for parents who are paying their kids’ tuition or handling financial aid forms.

“Parents have been trained to have a real sort of dystopian level of surveillance over their children, and this is a company trying to make money off of profiting off that anxiety and the need to monitor and surveil rather than to prepare their child to be an adult,” Hendricks said. “The company is playing on this fear that something terrible could happen and you won’t be able to help your kid.”

‘A gradual roll into adulthood’

Epps, the Littleton mom, felt her fear realized after her son got sick while at CU Boulder. He didn’t know how to advocate for himself when he went to the doctor, she said, and he didn’t say much when she asked how his appointment went. She tried to call the university to learn more, but was told she couldn’t access his medical information.

Epps’ son ended up developing pneumonia and needed to come home to get better, missing about a month of school, she said.

“Now that he has Mama Bear in place, I can talk to anyone,” she said. “Which would hopefully prevent something like that from happening in the future. I would have known had they said his oxygen levels are low that things were bad.”

Yet Epps would not define herself as a “mama bear.” Instead, she said she hails from the “suck it up, buttercup” line of parenting.

However, when she saw Mama Bear all over her social media feeds, she said it felt like the answer to anxieties that ramped up after her son’s sickness.

“I cannot recommend enough that people do it because you will have no authority, and it happens the day they turn 18,” Epps said. “There’s no grace period. There’s no, ‘Oh, let’s help you get used to this.’ It’s 18, and you’re cut off.”

Epps said she doesn’t track her son’s grades, but that it’s a nice feature to have just in case. Plus, she said the whole thing is a good deal because it doesn’t expire until her son revokes it, meaning she doesn’t have to pay some kind of annual fee.

She said she didn’t have much of a conversation with her son about the paperwork.

“I think I just said ‘sign this,’” she said. “I just don’t think they understand, to go from having someone who makes all of your medical appointments for you and manages your prescription drugs to being completely alone — they don’t understand that it’s so sudden. We’re covering his tuition and living expenses, so there’s a gradual roll into adulthood. It’s not like that for this. They’re so strict about privacy laws.”