PUBLISHED FRI, JUN 11 20218:37 AM EDTUPDATED 4 HOURS AGO
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China has punished 27 government officials deemed responsible for last month’s ultramarathon deaths, the state-run People’s Daily said.
Twenty-one people died of hypothermia when extremely cold weather suddenly descended on a government-organized 100 km marathon on May 22 in the rugged northwestern province of Gansu.
Chinese President Xi Jinping addresses the opening ceremony of the fifth annual meeting of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank via video link, in Beijing, capital of China, July 28, 2020.Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
China has punished 27 government officials deemed responsible for last month’s ultramarathon deaths, the state-run People’s Daily said on Friday, one of the world’s deadliest sporting tragedies in recent history.
Twenty-one people died of hypothermia when extremely cold weather suddenly descended on a government-organized 100 km marathon on May 22 in the rugged northwestern province of Gansu.
The head of Jingtai county, where the race was held, was dismissed from her post, the People’s Daily reported, citing a news briefing by investigators.
Other organizers held accountable included the mayor and the Communist Party chief of the city of Baiyin, to which the jurisdiction of Jingtai belongs.
Other punishments imposed on officials included major demerit ratings and disciplinary warnings.WATCH NOWVIDEO06:54Asia’s growing addiction to the ultramarathon
Li Zuobi, the Jingtai county party chief, fell from his apartment building on June 9 and died, state media reported, adding that the police have ruled out homicide while Li’s death was still being investigated.
It was not clear whether or not Li’s death was linked to the ultramarathon.
The investigators said the tragedy was a public safety incident brought about by extreme weather including high winds, heavy rain and plunging temperatures, as well as unprofessional organization and operation.
China’s sport administration said last week it was suspending all high-risk sports events that lack a supervisory body, established rules and clear safety standards.
The activities halted include mountain and desert trail sports, wingsuit flying and ultra-long distance running.
President Biden.Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock
Images of Joe Biden giving speeches and shaking hands with foreign dignitaries duringhis ongoing trip to Europewill take up space in the news over the coming week. But once he returns to the United States, the pattern that’s prevailed over the past five months will likely resume.
Which means the president will once again disappear.
It was common for Democrats during the 2020 presidential campaign to talk encouragingly about how boring a Biden administration would be in comparison to the nonstop cycle of chaos, cruelty, and outrage that prevailed under President Trump. Where Trump tweeted partisan provocations day and night, keeping reporters and pundits furiously scribbling, analyzing, and denouncing 24/7, life under a Biden presidency would return to normal, with a slower pace and the president…
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When I first adopted a plant-based diet, I wasn’t sure how to best replace animal products with vegan ones.
Fortunately, it turned out to be easy to get enough protein without meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. Even better, I quickly discovered that vegan protein sources are delicious and incredibly easy to prepare.
The average person needs approximately 0.45–0.73 grams of protein per pound of body weight (1.0–1.6 grams per kg) daily, depending on your physical activity level. That’s about 70–113 grams for a 155-pound (70-kg) individual (1Trusted Source).
Because there are so many protein-rich plant foods, you can easily get enough protein on a vegan diet. Plus, experts agree that a well-planned plant-based diet provides all of the nutrients you need, including protein (2Trusted Source, 3Trusted Source, 4Trusted Source).
Here are some of the best vegan sources of dietary protein, plus a helpful chart.
You can enjoy them on their own, blended into nut butters, mixed into yogurt, oatmeal, or trail mix, or added to smoothies, salads, grain dishes, and homemade veggie burger patties.
A small, 1-ounce (28–30-gram) serving of various nuts and seeds offers roughly 4–9 grams of protein. You can eat them raw or add them to various foods, such as a smoothie, oatmeal, or salad.
A growing number of nondairy milks are available today, but not all of them are great sources of protein.
If you’re hoping to use nondairy milk as a source of protein, be sure to buy one of the varieties below. These can be used just like dairy milk in coffee, soup, and batter for baked goods, as well as smoothies, cereal, and cream sauces.
Vegan meats go beyond packaged plant-based burgers and hotdogs.
Soy foods like tofu and tempeh work well in breakfast scrambles, roasted in the oven, and in stir-fries, burritos, and sandwiches. Seitan, a savory protein made from vital wheat gluten, is great in soups, salads, grain dishes, tacos, and sandwiches.
Grains are a lesser-known source of plant protein but offer a great way to supplement your protein intake.
You can use cooked grains as the base of a meal, incorporate them into homemade veggie burgers and granola bars, top salads and soups with them, stuff bell peppers with them, and eat them in breakfast bowls and burritos.
Many people on vegan diets wonder how to get enough protein.
You’ll be glad to know that plenty of protein-rich plant foods provide more than enough of this nutrient to meet the recommended daily needs.
For example, legumes and vegan meat alternatives — and even certain nondairy milks, whole grains, and fruits and veggies — are great sources of protein on plant-based diets.
Just one thing
Try this today: One of my favorite high protein vegan dishes is a tofu breakfast scramble.
To make it, sauté your favorite chopped veggies (I like broccoli, bell pepper, onion, and garlic) with a little olive oil, then season them with turmeric, black salt, and nutritional yeast, and add a block of crumbled extra-firm tofu until it’s warm.
Optional additions include baby spinach, diced tomatoes, and vegan shredded cheese.
Restoring nature boosts biodiversity and ecosystems that can rapidly and cheaply absorb carbon emissions
A snorkeler swims through bleached coral in the Maldives. Half of the world’s coral cover has been lost since Victorian times, say scientists. Photograph: AP
Humanity must solve the climate and nature crises together or solve neither, according to a report from 50 of the world’s leading scientists.
Global heating and the destruction of wildlife is wreaking increasing damage on the natural world, which humanity depends on for food, water and clean air. Many of the human activities causing the crises are the same and the scientists said increased use of nature as a solution was vital.
The devastation of forests, peatlands, mangroves and other ecosystems has decimated wildlife populations and released huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Rising temperatures and extreme weather are, in turn increasingly damaging biodiversity.
They also warned against action on one crisis inadvertently aggravating the other, such as creating monoculture tree plantations that store carbon but are wildlife deserts and more vulnerable to extreme weather.
“It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” said Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister.
The peer-reviewed report was produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts, who were convened by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, both which report to the world’s political leaders.
The report identified actions to simultaneously fight the climate and nature crises, including expanding nature reserves and restoring – or halting the loss of – ecosystems rich in species and carbon, such as forests, natural grasslands and kelp forests.
“It’s very disturbing to see the impacts over recent years,” said Prof Alex David Rogers, of conservation group REV Ocean and the University of Oxford, and a report author. “Between 1970 and 2000, mangrove forests have lost about 40% of their cover and salt marshes an estimated 60%. We’ve also lost half of coral cover since Victorian times.”
Food systems cause a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and more sustainable farming is another important action, helped by the ending of destructive subsidies and rich nations eating less meat and cutting food waste.
“Animal agriculture not only emits 10 to 100 times more greenhouse gases per unit product than plant-based foods, they also use 10 to 100 times more land,” said Prof Pete Smith, of the University of Aberdeen. “So more plant-based diets would mean more environmentally friendly farming and then there would be more land on which to apply nature-based solutions.”
The scientists also warned against actions that tackled one crisis but worsened the other. “When I went for a walk in a plantation forest in England, it was sterile. It was a single, non-native species of tree,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, of the University of Plymouth. “There was nothing else there, no insects, no birds, no undergrowth. You might as well have built a concrete building.”
Past tree planting on carbon-rich peatlands that had never been forested was another example, said Smith. “That was an epic fail for the climate and for biodiversity.”
Planting very large areas with single crops to burn for energy was also problematic, even if the CO2 was captured and buried, Smith said: “To get the billions of tonnes of carbon removal that has been proposed in some scenarios for global stabilisation of climate, you would need thousands of millions of hectares – an area twice the size of India.”
Protecting and restoring natural ecosystems was the fastest and cheapest way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, the scientists said. Cutting fossil fuel emissions was essential, but not enough at this point in the climate crisis, said Parmesan. “We cannot avoid dangerous climate change without soaking up some of the carbon that we’ve already put into the atmosphere and the best way to suck up carbon is using the power of plants,” she said.
“The science of restoration of ecosystems has really blossomed over the last 40 years. We are now able to efficiently and effectively restore complex systems, tropical rainforest, coastal wetlands, kelp forests and seagrass meadows, natural American prairie, and UK meadows back to their near historical diversity.”
Prof Mark Maslin, of University College London, said the report was seminal: “The science is very clear that climate change and biodiversity are inseparable. To stabilise climate change we need massive rewilding and reforestation.”
The UK environment minister, Zac Goldsmith, said: “This is an absolutely critical year for nature and climate. With the UN biodiversity [and climate summits], we have an opportunity and responsibility to put the world on a path to recovery. This hugely valuable report makes it clear that addressing biodiversity loss and climate change together offers our best chance of doing so.”
“If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date,” Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA, saidBy Morgan SmithJune 08, 2021 03:27 PMhttps://3cd329176f5fdaeebc6c012a2cf17e7c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.htmlhttps://3cd329176f5fdaeebc6c012a2cf17e7c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.htmlADVERTISEMENT
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Despite many people staying indoors and off the roads for the past year amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,new datafrom the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows carbon dioxide levels have soared to a record high, alarming many scientists that the climate-change crisis is quickly getting worse.
Theresearch, published Monday by a group of scientists from NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, measured carbon dioxide levels, the chief human-caused greenhouse gas, at Mauna Loa, Hawaii in May, when carbon levels in the air peak.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide saw a monthly average of 419…
Customers select seafood at a wet market in Dandong, Liaoning Province, China, in 2017. (Philip Wen/Reuters)
Speaking of wet markets, a new research paper offers the results of an exhaustive review of the animals sold in the wet markets in Wuhan before the outbreak of COVID-19. Perhaps most surprisingly, the review of more than 36,000 animals of 38 species in 17 wet market shops concludes that pangolins and bats were not sold in the wet markets of the city. But the study cannot rule out that some other species of animal sold in the city’s wet markets was the source of the virus.
The investigation of the animals sold sounds pretty thorough:
X.X. was granted unique and complete access to trading practices. On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed). Additionally, to substantiate interview data, the number of individuals available for sale at the time of each visit was noted, and animals were checked for gunshot wounds (from homemade firearms—gun ownership is strictly regulated in China) or leg-hold (snap) trap injuries, indicative of wild capture.
Across all 17 shops, vendors reported total sales of 36,295 individuals, belonging to 38 terrestrial wild animal species, averaging 1170.81 individuals per month Including species sold by weight inflated this total to 47,381 individuals. Notably, no pangolin or bat species were among these animals for sale.
But this information doesn’t completely slam the door on the wet market theory, because bats and pangolins are not the only species that could have carried the virus.
Almost all animals were sold alive, caged, stacked and in poor condition. Most stores offered butchering services, done on site, with considerable implications for food hygiene and animal welfare. Approximately 30 percent of individuals from 6 mammal species inspected had suffered wounds from gunshots or traps, implying illegal wild harvesting. Thirteen of these 17 stores clearly posted the necessary permits from Wuhan Forestry Bureau allowing them to sell legitimate wild animal species (e.g., Siamese Crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis), Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus), Common Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) and Amur hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis)) for food; four shops had no such permit. Species names were given in Chinese only, with no clear taxonomic binomial designation. None of the 17 shops posted an origin certificate or quarantine certificate, so all wildlife trade was fundamentally illegal. Notably, vendors freely disclosed a variety of protected species on sale illegally in their shops, therefore they would not benefit from specifically concealing pangolin trade or the trade in any particular species, and so we are confident this list is complete.
So which other animals have been found with SARS-CoV-2? This March, Nature listed “cats and dogs, to pumas, gorillas and snow leopards in zoos, and farmed mink” as animals that have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 after encountering an infected human being. Another study noted, “sporadic SARS-CoV-2 virus cases have been recorded in kept ferrets in Slovenia and in Spain.”
The new study reports that on average, each month the city’s wet markets collectively sold 38 racoon dogs, and ten minks. The original SARS virus was found in civet cat cages, and the markets sold about eleven masked palm civets per month. And if SARS-CoV-2 is contagious in a lot of varieties of small mammals… the markets sold on average of 332 amur hedgehogs, 168 Chinese hares, 43 Chinese bamboo rats, 30 red foxes, and a wide variety of others each month. That’s a long list of suspects.
“It almost felt as if they had a holy aura around them,” said Adam Chang, who was hired to deliver corn and pineapples to the elephants.00:49 /02:43TAP TO UNMUTE
June 11, 2021, 7:20 AM PDTBy Robbie Hu and Zeerak Khurram
A herd of elephants traipsing through southwest China has captured the imagination of millions.
Monitored by hundreds of police officers assisted by drones, the massive animals reached Kunming in southern Yunnan province earlier this week after traveling some 300 miles from their native nature reserve, state-owned media reported.
Adam Chang was hired to deliver corn and pineapples to the elephants, which on average stand 11 feet tall and weigh 11,000 lbs.
He said what he saw was amazing.
“I saw them picking apart the corn with their trunks,” he told NBC News over the messaging and social media app WeChat.
“They are just so much more lively than those I saw in the zoo. It almost felt as if they had a holy aura around them,” he said.
A migrating herd of elephants roam through a neighborhood near the Shuanghe Township, in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, last week. Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade / AP
While news of their migration has spread across China and gone viral online, with many expressing wonder and fascination, experts warned that this rare journey could indicate the inevitable and damaging consequences of human encroachment on the elephants’ natural habitat.
The herd reached Kunming on June 2, despite efforts from police to lure them back home. The animals took their time crossing what would have been busy thoroughfares, eating and stumbling into irrigation ditches before going to sleep in woods nearby.
After trending on social media in late May, many netizens were awestruck, while some complained about the destruction left in their wake.
Jason Cao, owner of a Yunnan mining company contracted by the government to deliver their feed, said he didn’t think the damage they caused was serious.
“Elephants are holy animals that can bring fortune and peace in Chinese culture, so we are very happy the elephants came,” he said.
Both Chang and Cao declined to offer their given first names because they had not been given permission to speak to the media by local officials and feared retribution. Instead they asked to be identified with their “American” names.
The herd first came to the attention of outsiders in March 2020 when they left their home in the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in southwest Yunnan at the border with Myanmar and Laos. A calf was born in November and two elephants split off from the rest in April 2021, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
Officials and experts say they don’t know why the herd is migrating.
According to Tammie Matson, zoologist and research fellow at the University of Rwanda and director of Matson and Ridley Safaris, elephants can travel long distances if there isn’t enough habitat to meet their needs.
“Some may be driven to move away to get access to these resources to avoid competition,” she said.
Experts have warned that this rare journey could indicate the inevitable and damaging consequences of human encroachment on the elephants’ natural habitat.Yunnan Forest Fire Brigade / AP
Xinhua has reported that the Asian elephant population in Yunnan has ballooned from 180 in the 1980s to 300 in 2021. So it is possible that as numbers grew, a subgroup began searching for new habitat, got lost and just kept traveling, according to Nilanga Jayasinghe, manager of the wildlife conservation team at WWF, an international nongovernmental organization that specializes in wildlife preservation.
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Netizens have plenty of theories as to why the elephants are migrating, blaming global warming and deforestation.
Asian elephants inhabit forests and grassland, so deforestation rates in Xishuangbanna, which reached an annual average of 4.1 square miles in 2010, may have contributed to the herd’s migration.
Still, long-distance treks are not unknown for the animals, according to Raman Sukumar, professor of ecology at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India, with similar migrations having happened in India and Sri Lanka.
These trips can have a negative impact on a herd’s health, he warned.
Wild Asian elephants lie on the ground and rest in Jinning district of Kunming, Yunnan province, China on June 7, 2021. A herd of 15 wild elephants has trekked hundreds of kilometers after leaving their forest habitat in Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, according to local media.China Daily / via Reuters
“I would expect that the stress levels in the elephants would start going up because the elephants are in a totally different kind of terrain,” he said. “It is very densely populated … It’s not so easy for them to navigate through a city.”
For Hannah Mumby, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Biological Sciences, it is important to address the root cause of their departure, otherwise this behavior could be repeated.
The China Central Television News Agency has captured signs of a second herd of elephants attempting to migrate across a river in Xishuangbanna.
In the meantime, those who have seen the elephants say the experience is more than memorable.
“Before this encounter I just felt curious about animals, now I think I would volunteer in animal rights groups to preserve those giant creatures,” Chang said.
Organization says the Southern Ocean consists of the waters surrounding Antarctica, out to 60-degrees south latitude
Scientists have long known that the waters surrounding Antarctica form a ‘distinct ecological region defined, by ocean currents and temperatures’. Photograph: British Antarctic Survey/Reuters
Anyone who thought the world had four oceans will now have to think again, after the National Geographic Society announced it would recognize a new Southern Ocean in Antarctica, bringing the global total to five.
The National Geographic, a non-profit scientific and educational organization whose mapping standards are referenced by many atlases and cartographers, said the Southern Ocean consists of the waters surrounding Antarctica, out to 60-degrees south latitude.
National Geographic Society geographer Alex Tait said scientists have long known that the waters surrounding Antarctica form a “distinct ecological region defined, by ocean currents and temperatures”.
Tait told the Washington Post that the span of water is yet to be officially recognized as an ocean by the relevant international body: “But we thought it was important at this point to officially recognize it.”Advertisement
“People look to us for geographic fact: How many continents, how many countries, how many oceans? Up until now, we’ve said four oceans,” Tait said, referring to the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian and Pacific.
The US Board of Geographic Names, a federal body created in 1890 to establish and maintain “uniform geographic name usage” through the federal government, already recognizes the Southern ocean as occupying the same territory, but this is the first time the National Geographic has done so.
Attempts to ratify the boundaries and name of the Southern Ocean internationally have been thwarted.
The concept was proposed to the International Hydrographic Organization, which works to ensure the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted, in 2000, but some of the IHO’s 94 members dissented. Despite that, Tait said it was important that the National Geographic christen the water area.
“We think it’s really important from an educational standpoint, as well as from a map-labeling standpoint, to bring attention to the Southern Ocean as a fifth ocean,” Tait told the Post.
“So when students learn about parts of the ocean world, they learn it’s an interconnected ocean, and they learn there’s these regions called oceans that are really important, and there’s a distinct one in the icy waters around Antarctica.”
