Bogota (AFP) Dec 17, 2022 Rebels in Colombia who have launched an armed strike have essentially trapped thousands of people in the northwest, authorities said Friday. Around 9,800 people have been forced to confine themselves due to the “indefinite armed strike” imposed in Choco department by the ELN guerrillas amid congoing peace negotiations with the government, the Ombudsman’s Office reported. “Following thehttp://dlvr.it/SfY19F Continue reading Almost 10,000 trapped amid Colombia rebel “armed strike”

Jakarta (AFP) Dec 16, 2022 The death toll from an earthquake that hit Indonesia’s main island Java last month has jumped by hundreds to 602, a local administration official said Friday, after authorities verified unreported casualties across the worst-hit town. The shallow 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit the town of Cianjur in Indonesia’s most populous province West Java on November 21, with most of the victims killed … Continue reading Indonesia quake death toll jumps to 602 after new count

Geneva (AFP) Dec 14, 2022 The flare-up in Covid-19 cases in China was well underway before the government began easing restrictions, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday. Officials in China warned that cases are rising rapidly in Beijing after the government abruptly abandoned its zero-Covid policy, scrapping mass testing and quarantines after nearly three years of attempting to stamp out the virus. “Thttp://dlvr.it/SfT6nx Continue reading China Covid ‘explosion’ began before restrictions eased: WHO

Montreal (AFP) Dec 15, 2022 The thorny issue of how much money wealthy countries are willing to pony up to protect the world’s remaining biodiversity took center stage Wednesday at UN talks in Montreal aimed at creating a “peace pact with nature.” At stake is the future of the planet and whether humanity can roll back habitat destruction, pollution, and the climate crisis, which are … Continue reading Developing nations demand more money at crunch UN biodiversity talks

Noflaye, Senegal (AFP) Dec 14, 2022 After a gruelling trip by air and road, several dozen endangered African tortoises groggily poked their heads out of their shells to take a look at their ancestral homeland. Forty-six tortoises born and raised in captivity in Monaco have been brought to Senegal as a first step to returning to the wild. They are African spurred tortoises – a … Continue reading Endangered African tortoises make trek home from Monaco

Montreal (AFP) Dec 15, 2022 Representatives from countries around the world have gathered at a United Nations summit in Montreal this week to hammer out a “peace pact for nature.” Here are the figures that define the COP15 talks. – 30 by 30 – Headlining the COP15 biodiversity talks is a drive to secure 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans as protected zones by … Continue reading Key figures in UN nature summit

San Francisco CA (SPX) Dec 15, 2022 Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, has announced it is making geospatial data available through Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning (ML) service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, Planet data can be directly embedded into Amazon SageMaker, allowing data scientists and ML engineers to acquire and analyze … Continue reading Planet makes its geospatial data available through Amazon SageMaker

Exeter UK (SPX) Dec 14, 2022 Discoveries at a major new fossil site in Morocco suggest giant arthropods – relatives of modern creatures including shrimps, insects and spiders – dominated the seas 470 million years ago. Early evidence from the site at Taichoute, once undersea but now a desert, records numerous large “free-swimming” arthropods. More research is needed to analyse these fragments, but based on … Continue reading Fossil site reveals giant arthropods dominated the seas 470 million years ago

Paris (AFP) Dec 14, 2022 A mysterious surge in planet-heating atmospheric methane in 2020 despite Covid lockdowns that reduced many human-caused sources can be explained by a greater release from nature and, surprisingly, reduced air pollution, scientists said Wednesday. Methane stays in the atmosphere only a fraction as long as carbon dioxide, but is far more efficient at trapping heat and is responsible for roughlhttp://dlvr.it/SfQ01Z Continue reading Study explains surprise surge in methane during pandemic lockdown

Leipzig, Germany (SPX) Dec 15, 2022 The idea that humans are facing a global extinction of experience of nature is popular, but there is poor empirical evidence of its reality. To shed more light on this, the scientists measured how the average distance from an individual’s home to the nearest area with low human impact changed in the last decade. They found that humans currently … Continue reading Humans and nature: The distance is growing