Http://chng.it/L5khkpmJrH

http://chng.it/L5khkpmJrH

https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2019/04/17/demolition-800-year-old-sacred-trees-compared-notre-dame-fire

NITV

Demolition of 800-year-old sacred trees compared to Notre-Dame fire

Campaigners have been fighting plans to bulldoze trees sacred to the Djap Wurrung peoples.

Here is a petition to renew Awae

http://chng.it/LkJGRHsb9V

My conure does exactly the same thing. He even talks to "the void" and gets upset when it doesn't answer.Why does he do that?Does he expect someone to come out?

When my parrot wants pets off someone he’ll go up to them, say hello, and lower his head to expose his neck. Recently, however, he’s been doing this to a pitch black crevice behind the couch, even trying to cajole the darkness with kissy noises and getting sad when the void won’t pet him. How do I explain that dark chasms are not friends?

Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests

The demand for ‘perfect’ fruit and veg means much is discarded, damaging the climate and leaving people hungry

Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening hunger and poverty, and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment. By one government tally, about 60m tonnes of produce worth about $160bn (£119bn), is wasted by retailers and consumers every year - one third of all foodstuffs. 

But that is just a “downstream” measure. In more than two dozen interviews, farmers, packers, wholesalers, truckers, food academics and campaigners described the waste that occurs “upstream”: scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality. 

When added to the retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce grown, experts say.

Retail giants argue that they are operating in consumers’ best interests, according to food experts. “A lot of the waste is happening further up the food chain and often on behalf of consumers, based on the perception of what those consumers want,” said Roni Neff, the director of the food system environmental sustainability and public health programme at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore.

“Fruit and vegetables are often culled out because they think nobody would buy them,” she said.

But Roger Gordon, who founded the Food Cowboy startup to rescue and re-route rejected produce, believes that the waste is built into the economics of food production. Fresh produce accounts for 15% of supermarket profits, he argued.

“If you and I reduced fresh produce waste by 50% like [the US agriculture secretary] Vilsack wants us to do, then supermarkets would go from [a] 1.5% profit margin to 0.7%,” he said. “And if we were to lose 50% of consumer waste, then we would lose about $250bn in economic activity that would go away.”

The farmers and truckers interviewed said they had seen their produce rejected on flimsy grounds, but decided against challenging the ruling with the US department of agriculture’s dispute mechanism for fear of being boycotted by powerful supermarket giants. They also asked that their names not be used.

“I can tell you for a fact that I have delivered products to supermarkets that was [sic] absolutely gorgeous and because their sales were slow, the last two days they didn’t take my product and they sent it back to me,” said the owner of a mid-size east coast trucking company.

“They will dig through 50 cases to find one bad head of lettuce and say: ‘I am not taking your lettuce when that lettuce would pass a USDA inspection.’ But as the farmer told you, there is nothing you can do, because if you use the Paca [Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act of 1930] on them, they are never going to buy from you again. “Are you going to jeopardise $5m in sales over an $8,000 load?”

Massive food waste is based into capitalist agriculture. If the vast majority of the food produced in America’s farms was brought to market, it would drive prices down rapidly, threatening the profits of retailers. Less than 1% of this surplus food ever reaches the mouths of the hungry. 

Princess Latifa Is Missing!

Princess Latifa of Duba (in the UAE) has recently gone missing, but not before posting a chilling video of herself, stating that “if you are watching this video, then I’m either dead, or in a really really bad situation.” 

Latifa is a member of the Dubai royal family, and recently decided to defect from the authoritarian regime, in which she had previously lived as a prisoner under her own father. 

She recently tried to escape on a yacht. However the yacht was apprehended by Emirates forces and Princess Latifa was taken. She has since been missing. Her fate is unclear. 

Human rights groups are counting on applying pressure on the UAE government to clarify her current location. The Dubai government has responded by accusing those who have reported her missing as criminals. The validity of this statement is highly questioned.

Princess Latifa is likely in grave, life threatening danger. Every reblog can contribute to the mounting pressure on the UAE government to reveal her location. Please reblog, we might save someone’s life. 

https://www.change.org/p/tumblr-remove-neo-nazis-and-white-supremacists-from-tumblr?recruiter=22942984&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial

Since reporting Nazi blogs doesn’t seem to work…