Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

As únicas pessoas responsáveis pela própria paz, somos nós

The only people responsible for peace itself are us

Pensamentos.me/VEM comigo!

“Faça o que for preciso para alcançar a si mesmo, dentro de si”. Eu sei que pode ser estranho o que estou falando, mas isso faz despertar a consciência de quem somos ou do que gostaríamos de nos tornar. Faz também olhar para as outras pessoas, projetos, situações, ou seja, tudo que transmite a ideia de valor, benefícios, dentre eles, a paz que o maior bem desejo.

O ser humano deseja ter um bom resultado em tudo. Ele fala muito de si, e oculta muito de si também. Costuma fingir-se de forte para construir a própria fortaleza. Viver é saber suportar as coisas de modo que, se possa crescer em meios aos desafios, e no final de tudo ter paz, sossego e um pouco de felicidade.

Situações promissoras podem contribuir para o meu bem-estar pessoal.Ter atitudes que reforça a nossa autoestima, o nosso progresso pessoal, diria que até a autoconfiança…

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Florida’s new surgeon general skeptical of vaccines, opposes masks | Ars Technica (Me: Death cult now Florida state policy?)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that the state’s new surgeon general will be Joseph Ladapo, a UCLA researcher known for opposing evidence-based mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns.

Instead, Dr. Ladapo advocates for the controversial idea of embracing “the reality of viral spread” to achieve herd immunity.

“Florida will completely reject fear as a way of making policies in public health,” Ladapo said in a press conference Tuesday after DeSantis announced his appointment. Fear, he said, has “been unfortunately a centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic and it’s over here. Expiration date: it’s done.”

Source: Florida’s new surgeon general skeptical of vaccines, opposes masks | Ars Technica

COVID-19: Quebec nurse taken to hospital after assault at pharmacy, police say | Globalnews.ca

Sherbrooke police are asking the public for help in their search for a suspect who assaulted a nurse.

Police say the man in question showed up at a pharmacy on 12th Avenue, where the nurse is administering the COVID-19 vaccine.

“He was angry and aggressive,” said police spokesperson Martin Carrier.

The suspect accused the nurse of having “vaccinated his wife without her consent” before “punching her several times in the face” and leaving the scene, according to Carrier.

READ MORE: Quebec won’t rule out law to ban anti-vaccine protests outside schools, hospitals

Police say the nurse was taken to a hospital with “serious facial injuries.”

Investigators are looking for a man who is between 30 and 45 years old. He is described as having an “average build.”

Source: COVID-19: Quebec nurse taken to hospital after assault at pharmacy, police say | Globalnews.ca

Brazilian minister tests positive for Covid after meeting maskless Johnson | Coronavirus | The Guardian (Me: Karma?)

Brazil’s health minister, Marcelo Queiroga, has tested positive for Covid and gone into isolation, 24 hours after meeting a maskless Boris Johnson and other British officials in New York.

Queiroga, who sat close to Johnson and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, on Monday during their meeting with Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, announced his positive test on Twitter on Tuesday night.

Soon after, the Brazilian news website Metrópoles reported that Brazil had decided to abort its participation in the UN general assembly as a result of what was the second confirmed case of Covid in its delegation.

Queiroga, 55, a cardiologist, was filmed shaking hands with Johnson and patting the prime minister on the arm during Monday’s gathering at the consulate general’s house in New York.

Source: Brazilian minister tests positive for Covid after meeting maskless Johnson | Coronavirus | The Guardian

Climate change: How to plant trillions of trees without hurting people and the planet – Vox

“By planting millions of young trees, the nation is working to foster a new, lush green Turkey,” Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said when he kicked off the project in Ankara.

Less than three months later, up to 90 percent of the saplings were dead, the Guardian reported. The trees were planted at the wrong time and there wasn’t enough rainfall to support the saplings, the head of the country’s agriculture and forestry trade union told the paper…

One of the most stunning examples of these failures comes from Fleischman’s research in northern India. If there’s a place where tree-planting projects might work, it’s in the state of Himachal Pradesh, said Fleischman, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who led the recent Nature study…

An analysis of satellite imagery and interviews with hundreds of households, however, revealed that decades of planting by the government — amounting to hundreds of millions of seedlings — “had almost no impact on forest canopy cover,” Fleischman wrote on Twitter. The researchers also measured a shift in the type of trees within the ecosystem, away from species that locals prefer for firewood and animal fodder. In other words, residents of Himachal Pradesh actually had fewer useful forest resources.

What went wrong? Some of the trees may have died quickly because they were planted in poor-quality habitat, Fleischman suspects. Farm animals could have also destroyed the saplings if they were planted in former grazing lands, he said. “Well-resourced forest restoration programs can fail to achieve their goals,” he added. “We need to be more skeptical of big claims.”

Researchers have also blamed large tree-planting efforts in China and Brazil for degrading grassland ecosystems. As I’ve previously reported, grasslands store vast amounts of carbon — most of which is below ground — and provide homes for countless species. Yet these ecosystems are sometimes considered degraded and are targeted for forest restoration campaigns…

Over the last 35 years, a nonprofit called Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas has worked with local communities to plant some 2.7 million native trees, as Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough reports. The trees provide useful products that locals want, such as fruit to eat and wood for building, and a new revenue stream from selling seedlings. At the same time, the new trees create a network of forest corridors that has helped populations of the tamarin recover. In this case, it really does seem to be a win-win-win.

At the center of successful tree-planting campaigns like this are people, said Chazdon, who is compiling examples of effective restoration projects for a new mapping platform called Restor. As it happens, the platform is led by Thomas Crowther, an author of the controversial 2019 study in Science, which helped fuel the forest restoration frenzy.

 

 

Source: Climate change: How to plant trillions of trees without hurting people and the planet – Vox

Avian Flu Diary: China: Guangdong Provincial Health Commission Announces Human H5N6 Infection In Dongguan City

While H5N6 hasn’t shown the ability to transmit efficiently from human-to-human, its high (roughly 50%) Case Fatality Rate – combined with its continual evolution – puts this virus near the top of our avian flu watch list. Source: Avian Flu Diary: China: Guangdong Provincial Health Commission Announces Human H5N6 Infection In Dongguan City

Bench Sitting Nature Watch

Michael Stephen Wills Photography

On a sunny autumn morning we set out, my soon to be three grandson Sam and I, to the Lime Hollow Nature Center near Cortland for an adventure. For the first time I brought a newly purchased iPhone 7 instead of the usual slr camera. The phone can be carried in a pocket and is simpler to us, to allow me to give full attention to Sam.

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At the start is a large, today sunlit, field with an “art trail.” There are various anthropomorphic transformations on the trees and a very large sculpture of a blue face. Here is a tree from another place near here, to give you an idea.

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I do not point out the tree faces to Sam. His Mom likes to say he enjoys being frightened and, when the blue face came into view, he turned back and said, “home.” Sam was mildly anxious, so I…

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