Great Eastern Brood set to emerge in the last two weeks of May and into early June, with hordes of bugs to push up from underground
Brood X, otherwise known as the great cicada hatching of 2021, is drawing closer as soil temperatures in some parts of America move closer to 64F (18C) – the trigger, according to scientists, for trillions of the insects to push up to the surface and into the trees to mate.
Related: If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects
Continue reading...Nearly 59m hectares of forests have regrown since 2000, showing that regeneration in some places is paying off
An area of forest the size of France has regrown around the world over the past 20 years, showing that regeneration in some places is paying off, a new analysis has found.
Nearly 59m hectares of forests have regrown since 2000, the research found, providing the potential to soak up and store 5.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – more than the annual emissions of the entire US.
Continue reading...First minister confirms easing of restrictions; EU pressuring AstraZeneca to deliver 120m doses by end of June; arrests made at protest over vaccine patents
Brazilian states halted vaccination of pregnant women on Tuesday after a death in Rio de Janeiro led health regulator Anvisa to warn against the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine for expecting mothers, Reuters reports.
A pregnant woman in Rio de Janeiro died after receiving the AstraZeneca shot, according to state Health Secretary Alexandre Chieppe, in a case authorities are still investigating.
Sao Paulo state suspended Covid-19 vaccination for pregnant women with risk factors and Rio state suspended immunisation of all pregnant women. Both states cited the Anvisa recommendation as a reason for the decision.
AstraZeneca investors narrowly approved pay package proposals for its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, after nearly 40% voted against the policy, which could hand him pay and perks of up to £17.8m for 2021, Julia Kollewe reports.
Related: Nearly 40% of AstraZeneca investors reject boss’s bonus rise
Continue reading...Concerns over bonds involving Trump’s then daughter in-law Vanessa and daughter Tiffany revealed in Carol Leonnig’s Zero Fail
Two Trump family members got “inappropriately – and perhaps dangerously – close” to agents protecting them while Donald Trump was president, according to a new book on the US Secret Service.
Related: A Very Stable Genius review: dysfunction and disaster at the court of King Donald
Continue reading...A muscle-bound crew of mercenaries infiltrate a Las Vegas full of zombies in Snyder’s uninspired Netflix horror-thriller
Zombies. They grunt. They lurch inelegantly through dystopian ruined streets, sometimes breaking into an athletic sprint. They stare sightlessly ahead, often with irises that glitter in the post-apocalyptic sunset with some nameless infection. Sometimes they shriek through hideously distorted mouths from which the flesh has already been half-eaten away, as they are blasted with a shotgun. They provide metaphors for consumerism and conformism, and they also furnish a low-budget horror launching pad for ambitious young directors. But zombies are often just boring: yucky and indistinguishable horror-vermin whose gruesome killing, in each case, is a dramatically uninteresting non-moment, and all too often humourless (although an honourable exception is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead).
And so it proves in this very long, very violent, video-game type horror-thriller from Zack Snyder. The premise is that, in a future-world in which a zombie outbreak has been contained by herding the shambling undead into a wrecked Las Vegas and walling them in, a tough Dirty Dozen-type crew is hired by a shadowy Vegas hotel owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) to bust into the city and retrieve the billions of dollars languishing in his hotel safe. The zombie slayers are led by man-mountain Scott (Dave Bautista), who is quaintly yearning for a non-mercenary retirement selling lobster rolls in his food truck, and include Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), Cruz (Ana De La Reguera), Lily (Nora Arnezeder) and Scott’s sensitive daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), who is still hurting from a tough decision that Scott had to make when Kate’s mum was bitten by a zombie.
Covid vaccine maker passes its remuneration policy but suffers sizeable rebellion
AstraZeneca has suffered a substantial shareholder rebellion over proposals to hand its chief executive, Pascal Soriot, bigger bonus awards for the second consecutive year.
Nearly 40% voted against the policy, which could hand him pay and perks of nearly £18m for 2021.
Continue reading...Israel launches strikes on Gaza as Hamas militants fire rockets after weeks of rising tensions in Jerusalem
Israeli jets and militants in Gaza have traded airstrikes for rocket attacks, in a ferocious confrontation that has continued almost non-stop since sundown on Monday, killing 24 Palestinians, including nine children, according to the enclave’s health ministry, and leaving two Israeli women dead and scores wounded.
After weeks of intense violence in Jerusalem, Hamas, the Islamist group that rules inside Gaza, fired a barrage of rockets towards the holy city on Monday evening, believed to be the first time it had targeted Jerusalem in more than seven years.
Continue reading...Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugees
A giant puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl is to “walk” from Turkey to the UK through villages, towns and cities for one of the most ambitious and complex public artworks ever attempted.
The Walk project was meant to have taken place between April and July but was delayed by the pandemic. Now the 5,000 mile (8,000km) journey of Little Amal, from Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border, to Manchester, will take place over 12 weeks from 27 July.
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Seven students have been killed and 16 injured in a school shooting in the city of Kazan in Russia’s Tatarstan republic, its president said. State media previously reported that 11 had people died, citing local emergency officials.
Footage from the scene showed emergency services assisting students out of the building's upper floors.
Continue reading...Val d’Aran regional government in Spain believes there are ‘several indications’ animal is responsible
Experts are analysing samples taken from the scenes of four recent attacks on livestock in northern Catalonia to determine whether they herald the return of a brown bear called Goiat who has become notorious for his depredations.
Goiat, who was brought to the region from his native Slovenia in June 2016 as part of an EU project to consolidate the bear population in the Pyrenees, is loathed by many farmers in and around the Val d’Aran because of his taste for sheep, goats and horses.
Continue reading...Dissidents and critics claim election campaign is charade
Iran’s outgoing president has criticised a sudden narrowing of the eligibility criteria for those hoping to succeed him as registration formally opened for candidates in the 18 June vote.
Dissidents and critics claim the campaign is just a charade and helps provide legitimacy to an autocratic regime but the tensions over who can stand – and the move by a powerful unelected body to exert greater control – has revealed the tensions in Iranian society over the outcome.
Continue reading...President of Tatarstan republic describes incident as ‘great tragedy for the whole country’
A gunman attacked a school in the Russian city of Kazan on Tuesday morning, killing seven students and a teacher, officials have said.
Rustam Minnikhanov, the president of the Tatarstan republic where Kazan is the capital, said four male and three female eighth-grade students died in “a great tragedy for the whole country”. Minnikhanov’s press service later said a teacher was also killed. Eighth-grade children in Russia are 13 and 14 years old.
Continue reading...Across Europe, worker-led delivery collectives are springing up to reclaim control from corporate platforms
Cristina González did a lot of waiting in 2018. Back then, the 29-year-old was a courier for the Spanish food delivery platform Glovo in her Basque home town, Vitoria-Gasteiz. She talks about feeling as if she was on standby the whole time: “You’re effectively having to be working constantly.”
While Glovo serves restaurants, customers can also order from supermarkets. This, Gonzalez says, was “a complete shitshow: supermarket orders are really easy to screw up”. If the supermarket did not have an item in stock and González completed the order, she might get a poor rating from the customer because of the missing item. If she turned down the order, González worried that it might affect her score on the platform. “It was very, very stressful.”
Continue reading...Rio’s favelas have suffered countless horrors since the drug conflict began to intensify in the 1980s and the carnage in Jacarezinho has caused a wave of protest
Shaken, shoeless and with a gaping bullet wound to one of his feet, the young man staggered through Flávia Luciana’s front door at around 8am last Thursday as Rio’s decades-long drug conflict plumbed horrifying new depths.
“Help me! For the love of God! Help!” she remembers him pleading as he sought shelter inside.
Continue reading...With one psychiatrist for 750,000 people and huge stigma about mental health, patients get little help
Radhwan Ali Hassan lives with his mother in a small house perched at the top of a sleepy Yemeni village called Aqeeqah, on the outskirts of Taiz city. From inside his bare-walled room, the 35-year-old hears the distant sound of an ice-cream van. He sees children running past his window and can smell goats, but he cannot remember the last time he walked outside.
Thick metal shackles around his ankles are attached to a heavy chain fastened to the far wall. They clatter as Hassan paces his room, rocks from side to side and smiles vacantly. His pupils are wide, his movements slow.
Continue reading...Analysis: Beijing’s census data confirms trend reflected across a region that is looked to as engine of post-pandemic growth
For many years China watchers have been concerned that its ageing population will slow economic growth, causing social as well as political problems. So today’s census data may be an alarm bell for leaders in Beijing.
But it is not just China that is witnessing this trajectory. Most countries in east Asia, even without fertility control policies such as China’s one-child or two-child policies, share the same predicament: how to continue economic growth while encouraging people to have more children?
Continue reading...I’ve watched from the UK as family and friends share increasingly desperate news. Nepal’s leaders have ensured the lack of preparation
Waiting for India’s Covid wave to break over Nepal has been as painful as it was inevitable. Now that it’s happening, this country of 30 million people is even more hapless and unprepared than India seems to have been.
My friend, Dr Rakshya Pandey, a pulmonary care doctor in Kathmandu, says that during her long shifts, the thought sometimes enters her mind: ‘‘Where would I go if I get sick? Where would I take my mother if she gets the virus?”
Continue reading...Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians escalated dramatically on Monday as militant groups in Gaza fired rockets into Israel and Israel responded with strikes on the Palestinian territory following a police raid on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem that left hundreds injured.
Deal values ‘yet to be formed’ technology division of THG at $6.3bn
The Hut Group (THG), the online retailer empire run by billionaire Matthew Moulding, has struck a complex joint venture deal with Japanese investment giant SoftBank that values a “yet to be formed” technology division of THG at $6.3bn (£4.5bn).
The deal, announced on Monday, values THG Ingenuity, which Moulding described as a “social media influencer platform” used to promote products, at about the same amount that the whole company floated at last year.
Continue reading...Coast guard vessel takes action after 13 Iranian fast boats come within 150 yards in strait of Hormuz
A US coast guard ship fired about 30 warning shots as a group of 13 Iranian fast boats sped toward US navy vessels in the strait of Hormuz, in what the Pentagon called “unsafe and unprofessional” maneuvers by the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGCN).
The incident marked the second time within the last month that US military vessels have had to fire warning shots because of what they said was unsafe behavior by Iranian vessels in the region, after a relative lull in such interactions over the past year.
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