Urgent

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain South Africa's agriculture remains an important sector of the economy and holds great potential to reduce poverty. It's also central to the political economy of the country, as evident in the governing African National Congress's (ANC) recent policy documents. The ANC acknowledges that agriculture…

It’s more than a piece of land. A thriving peach farm in the rural heartland of Catalonia is also the fertile earth that sustains multiple generations of an extended family. It’s the repository of the stories passed down from weathered grannies in funereal black cardigans to each fresh branch of an ever-spreading ancestral tree. It’s the launchpad for games of imagination for Iris (Ainet Jounou) and her semi-feral twin cousins. It’s a perpetual battleground: the men patrol at night with shotguns and spotlights, alert for…

Belgian film-makers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have long been darlings of the Cannes film festival, with prizes including Palme d’Or wins for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005), best screenplay for The Silence of Lorna (2008), a Grand Prix for The Kid With a Bike (2011) and best director honours for Young Ahmed (2019). As for their most recent feature, Tori and Lokita, which once again finds these masters of humanist film-making addressing the plight of young people, it took the special 75th anniversary prize when it…

The "questionable practices" at now collapsed crypto exchange FTX would not have been allowed to happen under European Union rules that need to be finalised urgently, a senior European Commission official said. The crash in bitcoin led to a "crypto winter", which saw the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, and earlier this week cryptocurrency lender BlockFi filed for bankruptcy protection. The European Union has reached agreement on groundbreaking markets in cryptoassets rules (MiCA) for licensing and supervision, expected…

Android mobile phones come with their default SMS app, but it can be very useful in cases like scheduling a text message or sending an SMS with an urgent mark. The app's text message scheduling feature has been available for some time. However, not many users are aware that they can also send an urgent text message so that the recipient reads it first. Additionally, you can include a subject line if you're writing a formal message. Google Messages: ‘Urgent’ text message requirementBoth users and the recipients need to be…

The scientists believe there are at least three wild ‘mystery ancestors’.Scientists are peeling back ancient layers of banana DNA in order to find the “mystery ancestors” before they go extinct.It is believed that humans domesticated bananas for the first time 7,000 years ago on the island of New Guinea. However, the history of banana domestication is complicated, and the distinction between species and subspecies is often unclear.A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science reveals that this history is…

John Adams’s Nixon in China, first performed in 1987, is usually regarded as launching the concept of “CNN opera”: music-theatre works that dealt with contemporary events and recent history, often with protagonists who were still alive when they were first portrayed on stage. But arguably the genre had begun the previous year, with the staging at the New York City Opera of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, by the composer and pianist Anthony Davis, based on the life and death of the militant human rights campaigner…

Maintaining bridges is expensive. There are 600,000 of them in the US, and the organizations that own and maintain them can easily pay $50,000 for sensor equipment alone, with further costs incurred by the need to maintain them and analyze the data they generate. Smartphones are a much cheaper option. However, work still needs to be done to make this technique a reality, says Ahmet Emin Aktan, a professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at Drexel University, who was not involved in the study. He…

The Union Home Ministry recently sought urgent and strict action by law enforcement agencies against predatory lending apps as harassment, blackmail and harsh recovery practices by such Chinese-controlled entities have led to multiple incidents of death by suicide. In a communication to all states and Union territories, the home ministry said the issue has caused a serious impact on national security, economy and citizen safety. It said a large number of complaints have been reported across India related to illegal…

Yet again, the stakes going into U.S. Election Day are soberingly high—and the results at all levels of government will have lasting ramifications for millions of human lives on issues ranging from abortion access to the climate emergency. Democrats have held the presidency and both houses of Congress for two years, taking some of the country’s most ambitious measures to date to combat climate change. At the same time, attention has waned among both Democratic and Republican policymakers when it comes to continuing…