Category Archives: News to use

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

B.C. heat wave ‘cooks’ fruit crops on the branch in sweltering Okanagan and Fraser Valley | CBC News

The heat wave that scorched Western Canada last week severely damaged fruit crops in the Okanagan and Fraser Valley as the province’s two major fruit-growing regions saw multiple days of temperatures above 40 C.

President of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association Pinder Dhaliwal estimates that 50 to 70 per cent of cherry crops were damaged in the heat wave. Dhaliwal said that apples, apricots and stone fruits have also been damaged to a lesser degree.

According to Dhaliwal, the heat wave “cooked” cherries right in the orchard, noting that they are brown in colour with burned leaves and dry stems.

“It seems like somebody took a blowtorch to it and just singed it,” says the orchardist from Oliver, in B.C.’s southern Interior.

Source: B.C. heat wave ‘cooks’ fruit crops on the branch in sweltering Okanagan and Fraser Valley | CBC News

Ortega Orders Night Raids, Arrests Student & Farm Leaders – Havana Times

This is the second time that peasant leader Medardo Mairena has been imprisoned by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. On July 13, 2018, he was captured and later sentenced to 216 years in prison for fabricated crimes of terrorism. He was released on June 11, 2019, under an Amnesty Law promoted by the regime to allow impunity for its own crimes, which include 328 documented killings in 2018. After the arrest, AUN released a video that Jerez recorded in case he was arrested or disappeared. “If you are watching this video, it is because I am detained by the dictatorship, or I am incommunicado, thus adding to the list of political prisoners of the Ortega regime [now over 150]. This is the moment to continue the struggle, the dictatorship wants to end hope, we must continue together this fight for the freedom of the Nicaraguan people,” he said.

Source: Ortega Orders Night Raids, Arrests Student & Farm Leaders – Havana Times

Haitian Journalist Diego Charles Shot Dead – Havana Times

Haitian authorities should conduct a swift and comprehensive investigation into the killing of journalist Diego Charles, determine if he was targeted for his reporting, and ensure those responsible are brought to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

At about 11:00 p.m. on June 29, unidentified men riding a motorcycle shot and killed Charles at the entrance of his home in the Christ-Roi area in Port-au-Prince, the capital, and fled the scene, according to news reports and Jacques Desrosiers, secretary-general of the Association of Haitian Journalists, a local trade group, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

The attackers also shot and killed political activist Marie Antoinette Duclair, who was inside a nearby car after driving Charles home following a meeting that both attended, according to those sources.

Charles worked as a reporter for the privately owned radio and television outlet Radio Vision 2000, the news website Gazette Haïti, and co-founded the news website Larepiblik Magazine, according to those sources and Valéry Numa, an anchor at Radio Vision 2000, who spoke with CPJ over messaging app.

Source: Haitian Journalist Diego Charles Shot Dead – Havana Times

How identifying hotspots of zoonotic disease could prevent another pandemic | Science| In-depth reporting on science and technology | DW | 06.07.2021

Regulating hygiene, or veterinary requirements for the trade and consumption of wild animals, might be a more effective strategy. This would also provide insight into the potential sources of danger.

Risk grids to identify hotspots

The World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) has worked with scientists from Hong Kong to develop a tool to assess wildlife markets for future risks of zoonotic outbreaks. The risk matrix, published in the One Health scientific journal, will initially be used to analyze wildlife markets in the Asia-Pacific region. The sales situation in the respective market and the animal species or the number of wild animals traded are taken into account.

The team surveyed 46 wildlife markets in Laos and Myanmar. They showed a high zoonotic risk on about half of the days when the researchers made their observations.

It is clear that there are wildlife markets that always seem to have a high risk of zoonosis, said Stefan Ziegler, Senior Conservation Advisor Asia for the WWF and one of the authors of the study.

Source: How identifying hotspots of zoonotic disease could prevent another pandemic | Science| In-depth reporting on science and technology | DW | 06.07.2021

Why we Need to Build Economies– not Walls– to Stop Migration | Inter Press Service

The faces you see of those arriving, in what could be the highest influx to the United States in 15 years, represent the reality in rural El Salvador, where so many people escaping poverty find only a dead-end.

Years of reliance on imported food has held back the development of the country’s agricultural sector, on which so many rural families rely. This has created a vicious cycle that suppresses the domestic market, limits job creation and forces rural workers to look to cities and other countries, particularly rural youth, who are reluctant to work in agriculture because they see limited returns.

For my family, producing on the land has been a way of life for generations, and I am familiar with the challenges that farmers face.

I also know that Salvadoran farmers need not face a binary choice of stay and struggle, or risk everything by moving elsewhere. Instead of carrying a bag of belongings to the border, harvesting a sack of vegetables can represent the way not only out of poverty, but into a position of security and even prosperity, and I have seen how this can work.

Source: Why we Need to Build Economies– not Walls– to Stop Migration | Inter Press Service

How this one sector is the biggest cause of air pollution in Mumbai? — Beyond The Lines

Small, lethal particles in Mumbai’s air from the  transport sector have almost multiplied over the recent years making it now the greatest cause of the city’s now crumbling air quality.  A 2019-20 source assessment examination for PM2.5 toxin by the System of Air Quality Weather Determining And Research (SAFAR), under the Indian Institute of Tropical […]

How this one sector is the biggest cause of air pollution in Mumbai? — Beyond The Lines

Appalachian covid deniers anger nurses in Virginia – The Washington Post

Conspiracy theories about the pandemic and lies recited on social media — or at White House news conferences — had penetrated deep into their community. When refrigerated trailers were brought in to relieve local hospitals’ overflowing morgues, people said they were stage props. Agitated and unmasked relatives stood outside the ICU insisting that their intubated relatives only had the flu. Many believed the doctors and nurses hailed elsewhere for their sacrifices were conspiring to make money by falsifying covid-19 diagnoses.

Boucher and her colleagues were pained by those attacks — and infuriated by them. Unlike their exhaustion, that anger rarely showed on their faces, but it was often there: as they scrolled Facebook to see local ministers saying God was greater than any virus, or stood in line with unmasked grocery shoppers who joked loudly about the covid hoax.

On that December morning when she became the first person to receive the coronavirus vaccine in the 21 counties served by her hospital’s parent company, Ballad Health, Boucher breathed deeply as she described what she and her co-workers were up against. They were fighting not just for their patients’ lives, she said, but “against misinformation and reckless practices that have led to this virus getting so out of control.”

“I will never stop trying to convince everyone about the reality of covid-19,” she said.

As she rolled up her sleeve for her first injection of the newly approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, Boucher didn’t know if the rift in her community could be healed. But she hoped her example would at least inspire others to get inoculated…

Jamie Swift, a registered nurse who oversees infection prevention for Johnston and Ballad’s other hospitals, recalled her realization that “people would trust Facebook more than they would trust us” — and her horror at the consequences as the winter surge began.

“You work all day, and you see people who are struggling to breathe, and you see the horrible side of what covid can do. And then you go home and you see restaurants that are packed and grocery stores where person after person is going in without a mask,” said Swift, who in December was briefly hospitalized herself with the coronavirus. “There have been times when I broke down and cried. It was just devastating, because you leave the hospital and you come out into a community that doesn’t believe that it’s real and in what it can do.”

Source: Appalachian covid deniers anger nurses in Virginia – The Washington Post

Catalonia cracks down on nightlife again as COVID cases rocket | Euronews

Following in the footsteps of other parts of Spain, Catalonia has reimposed restrictions on nightlife due to a huge surge in coronavirus cases in the region.

The authorities decided on Tuesday to close nightclubs and other nighttime entertainment venues from this weekend, just weeks after opening them up again.

That is due to an “exponential” increase in COVID-19 cases, mainly among young people, who as of yet have not been prioritised for vaccinations.

Faced with soaring numbers of new infections, some Spanish regions has already reinstated curbs on nightlife.

Fearing that the surging contagion could strain health care services as stressed employees try to go on summer holidays, health officials in several parts of the country are also rushing to get COVID-19 vaccine shots to people under 30.

Source: Catalonia cracks down on nightlife again as COVID cases rocket | Euronews

Priti Patel set to propose new Ascension Island reception centre for UK asylum seekers | Euronews (Me: UK Tory Concentration camp?)

UK Ministers are expected to reveal proposals of a new law that could start to pave the way for the creation of offshore centres for asylum seekers on the British overseas territory of Ascension Island.

Right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Ascension is nearly 7,000 kilometres away from the British Isles. The British Home Secretary Priti Patel has said there would be criminal charges for migrants “knowingly” arriving in the UK without permission. (Me: “Criminal” to try to escape terror, torture, political suppression?)

Source: Priti Patel set to propose new Ascension Island reception centre for UK asylum seekers | Euronews