💭 Ethiopia: Tigray, the Region of Hunger ARTE Reportage
The Tigray region is cut off from the rest of Ethiopia because of the civil war that people are starving. In the past, the regional capital Mekele was once a modern model, today horse-drawn cars drive there, because a tank filling costs 700 dollars. In rural areas of Tigray struggles hindered sowing, people starve, first young children die.
There is no electricity, no milk powder and no petrol for the ambulances. Driving into the city does not help either, as everything is missing in the hospitals. It is war: you can already see this on the street corners, where hundreds of young people are watching, recruited as defenders of their region. Its only horizon is a 600 kilometre long front line: there are its enemies, the army of Ethiopia and the soldiers of the northern neighboring country of Eritrea.
💭 Äthiopien: Tigray, die Region des Hungers ARTE Reportage
Die Region Tigray ist wegen des Bürgerkriegs vom Rest Äthiopiens abgeschnitten, die Menschen hungern. Früher war die regionale Hauptstadt Mekele einmal ein modernes Vorbild, heute fahren dort Pferdewagen, denn eine Tankfüllung kostet 700 Dollar. In den ländlichen Gebieten vom Tigray behinderten die Kämpfe die Aussaat, die Menschen hungern, zuerst sterben die kleinen Kinder.
Es gibt keinen Strom, kein Milchpulver und kein Benzin für die Krankenwagen. In die Stadt zu fahren, das hilft auch nicht, da es auch in den Krankenhäusern an allem fehlt. Es ist eben Krieg: Das sieht man schon an den Straßenecken, wo hunderte Jugendliche wachen, rekrutiert als Verteidiger ihrer Region. Ihr einziger Horizont ist eine 600 Kilometer lange Frontlinie: Dort stehen ihre Feinde, die Armee Äthiopiens und die Soldaten des nördlichen Nachbarlandes Eritrea.
🐌 Another Giant African Snail Sighting Forces Florida County into Quarantine
The reappearance of an invasive snail species forced state officials to enact a quarantine order last week for residents of Florida’s Pasco County, an area north of Tampa along the gulf coast.
Authorities took action after confirming that a notoriously destructive breed of mollusk, known as the giant African land snail, was identified by a community gardener in the city of Port Richey. A division of Florida’s department of agriculture that manages pest control began to survey the region for additional snail sightings once the quarantine mandate was in place, according to the agency. The control unit started to treat the land with baited pesticide on Tuesday.
Florida’s agriculture department has called the giant African snail “one of the most damaging” mollusk subtypes in the world. Its unusually large size and ability to procreate in vast quantities allows the creature to infiltrate surrounding areas quickly, posing threats to vegetation and infrastructure because of its appetite for at least 500 different plants as well as paint and stucco. At four months old, a single snail can lay thousands of eggs at a time and each can grow to be 8 inches long as an adult.
The snails are mobile — experts warn that they “cling to vehicles and machinery,” plus trash, to “move long distances” — and resilient, with the capacity to survive for a year while “inactive” and buried in soil to shield itself from unfavorable weather. They also present serious health risks to humans, as the snails carry a parasite called rat lungworm that can cause meningitis. People are advised to wear protective gear, like gloves, when handling them.
Giant African land snails have wreaked havoc on parts of Florida before. Although they are not native inhabitants of the state, officials have traced infestations dating back to the 1960s to escaped house pets and illegal importations by religious groups, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Owning and importing giant African land snails without a permit is against the law in the U.S. Any attempt to move the snails after a sighting is also illegal without proper documentation.
This is by far the most endangered tribe of all the Omo populations, mainly because of their small numbers and their strong dependency on the river itself. The name Karo translated means “fish eaters”
Violent clashes between the Ethiopian army and tribes from the region are on the rise. A local human rights worker told me of their fears of an escalation in the crisis to civil war. “Many tribes are saying they will fight back rather than be moved off their traditional lands to make way for Chinese, Arab and Turkish owned plantations. They are living in fear but feel they have nothing to lose by fighting back.” More than 70,000 people are estimated to have been forced off their land in the Gambella Region in the west of the country to make way for Saudi Arabian and Chinese-owned rice growing plantations.
The increasing levels of foreign influence are also raising anxiety amongst people in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. “It’s a new form of colonialism,” one Ethiopian NGO worker told me in a coffee house. “We fear where we will we be in ten years’ time, when more and more of our land is controlled by these foreign investors.” Anxiety threatens to swell to resentment, with many Chinese and Indian companies operating in the country flying in their own workers, depriving Ethiopians of work, and ultimately leading to huge reserves of money leaving the country.
☆ Sumatra Island, Indonesia — An island of disappearing Rainforest and The Dog-eater mysterious KARO people.
😛 Amazing! This „Toilette„ image looks exactly like the Islamic Black Stone of Mecca (The Kaaba) + The Hindu ‘Shiva’ temple.
💭 Pro-abortion activists play soccer with a Bible, commit acts of desecration. The activists threw the Seattle preacher’s Bible into a portable toilet outside.
Disturbing footage from Seattle shows pro-abortion activists playing soccer with a Bible before proceeding to completely desecrate and destroy the sacred book.
In the highly offensive footage posted to social media on Sunday, a group of pro-abortion activists can be seen kicking a Bible back and forth to each other as if it were a soccer ball.
Desecration of another persons Religious material is a HATE CRIME. If this was a Quran people would be outraged. People must really hate the WORD of GOD right now. pic.twitter.com/IjXqab1qma
When the man recording the footage – who goes by “The Seattle Preacher” on social media — explains to the anti-Christian protesters that it is a “hate crime” to destroy someone else’s religious texts, a voice in the background can be heard cackling with laughter.
The video proceeds to cut to the Seattle Preacher holding the now-damaged Bible, telling the protesters that they would not have treated the book with such disrespect if it were the Quran.
Immediately, one of the protesters snatches the Bible back from the man, and the next piece of footage shows the Bible sitting in human waste in the bottom of a portable toilet.
“That right there is a hate crime … That is ungodly and it is wrong,” the Seattle Preacher lamented, with his voice breaking.
The blasphemous footage sparked a large reaction on social media, with pro-lifers and Christians expressing their disgust with the anti-Christian actions of the pro-abortion activists.
“These people are truly the cancer of Earth. Everything they pretend to be against is *exactly* who they are,” reacted prominent songwriter “Five Times August.”
“One day, their souls will understand how foolish and blind they truly are,” added professional poker player turned Christian evangelist Anna Khait.
This display of sacrilege is only one incident of many similar events that have occurred in the United States since the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court last Friday.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, two Christian pregnancy centers were the target of vandalism over the weekend, with one of the centers being set ablaze after being spray-painted with pro-abortion messages and threats.
In addition to the pregnancy centers, a historic Catholic church in West Virginia was burned to the ground last weekend in what authorities are describing as a “suspicious” fire.
💭 Biblical swarms of giant Crickets are turning US farms to dust
Northern Oregon rangeland, Jordan Maley and April Aamodt are on the lookout for Mormon crickets, giant insects that can ravage crops.
“There’s one right there,” Aamodt says.
They’re not hard to spot. The insects, which can grow larger than 2 inches (5 centimeters), blot the asphalt.
Mormon crickets are not new to Oregon. Native to western North America, their name dates back to the 1800s, when they ruined the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah. But amidst drought and warming temperatures — conditions favored by the insects — outbreaks across the West have worsened.
Can they be a secret tool in the battle against climate change?
ETHIOPIA IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST CENTERS of major and minor crop diversity. Ethiopian farmers have grown wheat, barley, sorghum, and peas for millennia, passing seeds from one generation to the next through an informal community-based seed sharing network.
Despite this tradition of agricultural biodiversity, Ethiopia is also an arid region, one vulnerable to climate change and drought. At a time of increasing globalization, Ethiopian farmers in recent generations have discarded seeds from hundreds of traditional grains in favor of a select few non-native industrial hybrids, but after many of these modern crops failed—partially due to climate change—farmers are shifting away from “modern” crops to safeguard the future and livelihood of Ethiopian rural communities.
Beginning in 2014, an ambitious project called Seeds for Needs, created with joint support from Ethiopian farmers and researchers at Bioversity International, Mekelle University, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, began researching Ethiopia’s past to reawaken ancient grains that might provide solutions to the country’s extreme vulnerability to drought and other environmental conditions.
TIGRAY IS ONE OF NINE REGIONAL STATES of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia, a country with over 100 million people. It is a small region, with only 5.5 million people, most of whom belong to the Tigrinya ethnic group, a vital cultural and political fixture in the country’s social landscape. While the Ethiopian population is growing rapidly—the average woman has four children in her lifetime (World Bank)— its food systems cannot keep up with growing demand. Consequently, undernutrition contributes to a child mortality rate of 28%, with stunting affecting 38% of children under the age of five (UNICEF).
Improving nutrition is made increasingly difficult by climate change, which now impacts healthcare, the environment, and the productivity of many crops and livestock. Thanks to its rich heritage of agricultural biodiversity, Ethiopia has the capacity to address undernutrition by enhancing agrobiodiversity, which spreads agricultural “risk” by growing a range of crops to meet the challenges of uncertain times. Unfortunately, most agronomic research is generally overlooked, while policymakers incorrectly assume that indigenous crops developed by hundreds of generations of farmers are less productive and unable to contribute significantly to food security. Policymakers have recently encouraged farmers to grow a small collection of modern grains to please food processors and international markets. This approach, which rarely includes traditional varieties, now threatens the country’s agricultural biodiversity and with it the survival of the country’s food production system.
One solution may come from the country’s near past. The Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, the largest and oldest Seed Bank in Africa, holds 6,000 accessions (different varieties) of teff, 7,000 accessions of durum wheat, and 12,000 accessions of barley. Can the bio-regional genetics of these seeds provide clues that may aid in the struggle against climate change? The international coalition behind Seeds for Needs thinks so. Led by Bioversity International, Scuola S. Anna in Pisa, Mekelle University, Amhara Region Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI), and the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute (EBI), this project has adopted a holistic, participatory action-driven approach to researching whether traditional varieties can help solve today’s agricultural challenges. The program, which has grown to include GIZ, the World Bank, the Integrated Seed System Development (a Dutch initiative), and the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture, uses extremely simple yet effective logic: if 4000 ancient grain varieties kept in the National Gene Bank’s seed vaults survived and adapted for millennia on farmers’ fields, they may provide benefits if returned to the very farmers who first developed and saved them. In Tigrinya, the farmers have a name for the initiative: Wehabit … or “We got it back”.
💭 Exotic, Gluten-Free Grain Grows in Popularity — Enough to Cause a Dust-Up in Eastern Oregon
A little-known grain from the Horn of Africa — billed as the next wave in America’s quest for healthy foods — is proving that competition for a hot commodity can get downright nasty.
Only a few thousand acres of Oregon farmland are believed devoted to the production of teff. But people suffering from gluten intolerance together with immigrants hungry for traditional Ethiopian and Eritrean ethnic dishes are driving up the domestic demand for the iron-rich grain.
All of which appears to have played into an angry clash between rival teff traders in the out-of-the-way Starlite Cafe last year in Vale.
Tiny grain
In Ethiopia:
Sometimes known as “love-grass,” teff was domesticated in Ethiopia in ancient times and is commonly grown the country’s highlands. While it’s the preferred grain of the Ethiopian people, it also is the country’s most expensive grain. It covers the greatest area of farmland of any Ethiopian crop, but has low per-acre yields and requires labor-intensive harvesting and processing techniques.
In U.S.:
How much teff is grown here is difficult to determine. OSU Extension agent Rich Roseberg calls it a “specialty crop.” “It’s a very attractive plant,” he says. “There are some types that have a purplish seed head and leaf that we are looking at as potentially ornamental.”
Nutrition:
Teff is 11 percent protein, 80 percent complex carbohydrates and 3 percent fat, according to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. It’s an excellent source of essential amino acids, particularly lysine, often deficient in grain foods. It’s gluten-free, making it an alternative to wheat, rye and barley.
Wayne Carlson of Caldwell Idaho, founder of The Teff Co., has pleaded guilty in Malheur County Circuit Court to a misdemeanor harassment charge in the incident with Tesfa Drar, who was born in Ethiopia and now lives in Minneapolis.
“This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” said Drar, a U.S. resident since 1981. “I was shocked.”
Court records say Carlson sat down beside Drar, who was meeting with a prospective teff grower in the cafe, and accused him of cheating growers and smuggling seed into the U.S. from Ethiopia. The two had never before met face-to-face, and Carlson allegedly used a racial epithet and told Drar to go back to his own country.
Carlson was sentenced in April to 12 months of probation, community service and ordered to write an apology to Drar.
The confrontation raised a lot of eyebrows. Teff production is a mere blip on the annual U.S. Department of Agriculture’s major agricultural crop charts. It stands in obscurity alongside organically grown Kamut, an ancient khorasan wheat from Egypt, and quinoa from the Andes of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in the ranks of exotic grains newly popular among health food consumers.
Drar said he thinks Carlson is afraid he’s going to take over the international teff business. “I have better access to the consumers who buy it,” he said.
Carlson and his attorney, Mike Mahoney of Vale, didn’t return phone calls for comment.
Teff is increasingly embraced as a high-quality horse hay and grown in at least 25 states, according to the University of Nevada Extension Service. Nevada is emerging as a big teff state, with 15 variations grown in Churchill County alone, mostly for cattle and horse forage.
Farmers in Oregon cultivate about 3,000 acres of teff for hay, said Rich Roseberg, an
Oregon State University Extension agentin Klamath Falls. They grow another 1,000 acres for food grain, he estimated.
Nationally, fewer than 10,000 acres are believed dedicated to food grain production of teff for milling into flour.
That’s in stark contrast to 53 million acres of wheat, 73 million acres of corn and 73 million acres of soybeans harvested annually in the United States.
Consumers, however, are catching the buzz that teff is nutritious, gluten-free and can be baked into breads, cookies, pizza crusts and other pastries. It’s widely used in East Africa for a flatbread called injera, for a porridge similar to cream of wheat and as a fermented alcoholic beverage.
Neil Koberstein, purchasing manager at Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods of Milwaukie, buys about 18,000 pounds of teff every 45 days to be stone ground into flour and sold, he said. That’s up from 7,500 pounds a decade ago.
“We’ve had remarkable growth in the last 10 years,” Koberstein said.
Teff seeds are so tiny, about 1.25 million to the pound, that “if you were to puncture a bag, it pours out like water,” Koberstein said. It takes about 150 teff seeds to equal a single grain of wheat.
For some people, flat breads and other pastries made from teff flour are an acquired taste, he noted. Taste descriptions range from sour to bland to delicious.
“Injera is sort of like a sourdough pancake,” said Brian Charlton, an OSU Extension agronomist in Klamath Falls who enjoys Ethiopian cuisine. “I liked it right away. I wish somebody would open a restaurant in Klamath Falls. I’d eat there all the time.”
Drar is adamant: Teff is the food of the future, and he wants everybody to eat it. His enthusiasm for the offbeat grain borders on the mystical and mythic:
“Ethiopians are always No. 1 as marathoners. Why do you think?” he asked, having dinner recently in the Hamley Steakhouse in Pendleton, where teff is definitely not on the menu. “It’s teff! They eat it three times a day!”
The word teff in the ancient Ethiopic language means “lost,” because the grains are prone to blowing away in the faintest breeze, he said. Three-thousand-year-old teff seeds have been found in Egyptian pyramids, he says.
Then, stealing a march on the biblical mustard seed, Drar added, “This is the smallest seed on Earth!”
Drar immigrated to America to study computer science and later to earn his living as a commodities trader. He was dismayed to find the injera that he was accustomed to having with his meals was absent from stores. He longed for it constantly.
Eventually, Drar flew to Ethiopia and brought 20 pounds of teff seed back to Minneapolis. He began cultivating a few acres, talked others into doing likewise and ultimately marketed his “Selam” brand of teff flour to ethnic grocery stores and restaurants.
These days, he travels the nation six months a year, using his van, smartphone and laptop as a mobile office. He takes orders for teff from ethnic stores and restaurants and works hard to convince farmers to partner with him in growing and marketing the grain.
Someday, he hopes to export American-grown teff to Ethiopia, which is too parched to grow enough for itself, he said.
“Teff is in my blood,” Drar said. “I don’t want to see people hungry.”
😢 What a shame; the UN is doing nothing but count the dead.
💭 The UN human rights office said on Tuesday that 306,887 civilians had been killed in Syria during the conflict since March 2011 in what it said was the highest estimate yet.
Syria’s conflict sprung out of peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule in March 2011 and morphed into a multi-sided, protracted conflict that sucked in world powers.
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The frontlines have been mostly frozen for years but violence is ongoing and the humanitarian crisis grinds on with millions still displaced within Syria’s borders.
UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said its latest analysis would give a “clearer sense of the severity and scale of the conflict”.
The toll included those killed as a direct result of war operations and not those who died from lack of healthcare or access to food or clean water. Nor did it include non-civilian deaths.
The top cause of civilian deaths was from so-called “multiple weapons” (35.1 percent) which includes clashes, ambushes and massacres, a U.N. report that accompanied the statement showed. The second cause of death was by heavy weapons (23.3 percent).
💭 The bodies of at least 46 migrants were found in the back of a hot semi-truck on Monday in San Antonio, Texas. Sixteen others, INCLUDING several CHILDREN, were discovered alive.
💭 White House: Biden not to blame for 50 dead migrants found in Texas 18-wheeler
Her comments came in response to a question from reporters aboard Air Force One Tuesday morning about the dozens of dead migrants found in a tractor-trailer in South Texas late Monday night. As of Tuesday morning, nearly 50 people had been pronounced dead at the scene.
“These deaths are on Biden,” Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) tweeted Monday night. “They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”
Jean-Pierre told reporters that the White House is “closely monitoring the absolutely horrific and heartbreaking reports out of San Antonio” and that Biden is receiving regular briefings on the tragedy.
She further pledged to continue the administration’s work to disrupt “human smuggling networks” that “exploit and endanger human lives to make a profit” before defending the administration’s decision to loosen pandemic-era border protections when asked about Abbott’s comments.
“The fact of the matter is, the border is closed, which is in part why you see people trying to make this dangerous journey using smuggling networks,” Jean-Pierre stated. “Our hearts go out to the families at this time. We are going to stay focused on the facts and making sure we hold these smugglers accountable.”