——————————————————————-
- Social media platforms will be required to proactively remove animal torture content on their sites under an amendment to the Online Safety Bill tabled by the UK Government. The update to the proposed online safety laws – which are currently moving through Parliament – would require platforms to put systems and processes in place to tackle content that encourages or facilitates animal torture. The amendment would see such content classified as a priority offence in the Bill – alongside content like child sexual abuse, threats to kill and revenge pornography – which firms are required to remove or face fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their global annual revenue. Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said: “This kind of activity is deeply disturbing and not something an animal-friendly nation like the UK should ever tolerate.
- “Apocalyptic food price rises”, a statement from the governor of the Bank of England. All over the world crops and fisheries are spiraling toward collapse, what happens when the food shelves in the local market are empty? Over a thousand fires are still raging in Canada, Greece has gone from total firestorm incineration to a year’s worth of rain in a day. Geoengineering is further fueling an ever more destructive cycle of droughts followed by firestorms followed by deluges. “Rainwater everywhere on earth is unsafe to drink due to PFAS forever chemicals”. Are the toxic heavy metal and polymer particles in our air connected to the recent official warnings about “fire brain” and “smoke brain”? Where did the “flesh eating” bacteria in our seas suddenly come from? How much longer can we survive on a completely contaminated planet? “We won’t be the first civilization to collapse, but we may well be the last”. ~ Dane Wigington
- Tesla China and McDonald’s China have teamed for an utensil to accompany its McFlurry ice cream — the “Cyber Spoons.” Only available in 50,000 quantities, the utensil is inspired by the unique design of the Tesla Cybertruck and arrives with a stamp on the handle that reads “DON’T PANIC,” referring to a book written by Douglas Adams entitled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A matching black storage option for safekeeping is available, which is branded with the “POWERED BY TESLA” phrase on the cap, while the McFlurry cup itself has been redesigned to suit the Cyber Spoon. Elon Musk denied the news by writing under a user’s post “it is false as far as I know”, yet the announcement was launched on Tesla’s official Weibo account and McDonald’s Xiaohongshu account.
- The Humane Society International (HSI) in Việt Nam has coordinated with Dong Nai Province to pilot an Elephant Conservation Project that sets up cameras to learn more about the animals and monitor conflict between them and people. The unique project is a joint effort between the government of Việt Nam and animal protection partner Humane Society International and is part of Viêt Nam’s new national elephant conservation action plan to protect the country’s remaining wild herds. By using camera traps to create individual photo IDs and profiles for each animal, while also monitoring human-elephant conflict incidents and conducting elephant distribution surveys, the project aims to better understand elephants, their movements and behaviours to help humanely mitigate human-elephant conflict which threatens this endangered sub-population of Asia’s elephants. Việt Nam’s once thriving population of wild forest elephants has declined from around 2,000 individuals four decades ago to now as few as 100-130. Đồng Nai is home to the second largest remaining wild elephant population in the country.
- In Tokyo, there is a restaurant where customers are happy to get bad service. You ask for dumplings, and you get miso soup. Whoops. You order grilled fish, and maybe you get sushi. Wait a minute. What? It’s a regular thing for the waiters and waitresses to mix things up, bring the wrong meal, misunderstand what a customer requests, or actually drink the glass of water they were meant to deliver to some table. This sort of thing gets these workers hired, not fired. Is this performance art? No, it isn’t a flaw. It’s the feature. It’s the primary qualification for the job. A Japanese television director, Shiro Oguni, created this business to change perceptions about aging and progressive cognitive impairment. It’s caused by a number of different conditions, one of them being Alzheimer’s, which is a specific disease. It required around $115,000 raised through crowd-funding to get started, yet it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a profitable, everyday restaurant built around Oguni’s mission.
- Wild boars have long been a problem in Germany, digging up graves, destroying crops, and attacking people. But what puzzles scientists is something they call the “wild board paradox.” The boars continue to be more radioactive than other animals in the area, even though their levels of radioactivity should have decreased over time. Researchers long believed the cause was the deer truffles they ate, contaminated by the Chernobyl accident in 1986. But fallout from nuclear weapons tests decades ago may also have contaminated the truffles, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The researchers found boar-meat contamination linked to atmospheric weapons from the 1950s and ’60s. The isotopes from the weapons and Chernobyl interacting may be the cause, one of the study’s authors, Bin Feng, told Vice. “The sources mixed together, and became a new source that can get stronger,” he said. “This is the reason, we think, why the cesium contamination is so strong and persistent.”
- The world must stop dividing countries into “developed and developing,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo stated at the G20 summit in New Delhi, as he urged for more “equal and inclusive cooperation.” “We need to put an end to the dichotomy that divides the world into north and south, developed and developing countries, east and west,” Widodo said in a statement delivered by the Press, Media, and Information Bureau of the Presidential Secretariat on Sunday. Indonesia, which is a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), hopes that the world will become “one big family,” built on the shared goal of creating a peaceful life for everyone, the president said. The theme of India’s G20 presidency has been “One Earth, One Family, One Future.”
- Child abuse consultation centers across Japan fielded a record number of reports in fiscal 2022–the 32nd consecutive year that child abuse reports in Japan have risen. According to the preliminary figures released by the Children and Families Agency on Sept. 7, FY 2022 saw 219,170 cases of reported child abuse, 11,510 more than the previous year. Breaking down the numbers into types of abuse, psychological abuse accounted for 59.1 percent, or 129,484 of the cases. That was followed by physical abuse at 23.6 percent, or 51,679 cases, neglect at 16.2 percent, or 35,556 cases, and sexual abuse at 1.1 percent, or 2,451 cases.
- The process of dedollarization on a global scale will be neither a fast nor an easy one, but it is definitely possible in the future, Carlos Tabunda, dean of the Faculty of International Relations at New Era University (Philippines), told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF). Many countries remain tightly linked to the American greenback, said the Philippine expert, which explains why the dedollarization process is still a “big challenge”.
- Vietman – Craft villages that make tools for catching fish and other aquatic creatures in the Cửu Long (Mekong) Delta are beginning peak production as the flooding season gets under way. The delta, the country’s rice granary, is usually flooded between August and November as water levels rise in the Mekong. Besides fertilising the rice fields with sediments, the floodwaters also bring in fish and other creatures. Flooding started in upstream provinces such as Đồng Tháp in the middle of last month, and farmers there have opened their rice fields to let the water in. Many have also started catching the creatures, and so demand for fishing tools is high. Bùi Văn Sum, who makes bamboo fish traps in a village in Hoà Long Commune in Đồng Tháp’s Lai Vung District, has increased production in the last two weeks to meet demand. Traders had ordered around 2,000 of the traps at VNĐ25,000 (US$1) apiece, and he could make a profit of VNĐ5,000 (20 US cents) on each, he said.
- Through the science of seismic imaging, researchers have revealed that an ancient ocean floor may be wrapped around the Earth’s core. “Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet, and we are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought,” said Samantha Hansen, lead author of the study, in a statement. “Analyzing 1000’s of seismic recordings from Antarctica, our high-definition imaging method found thin anomalous zones of material [UVLZs} at the CMB everywhere we probed,” said fellow author Edward Garnero. “The material’s thickness varies from a few kilometers to 10’s of kilometers. This suggests we are seeing mountains on the core, in some places up to 5 times taller than Mt. Everest.”
Rose Rambles... 