Tag: news

Heathrow’s Problem

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Featured Image: With an area of 1,214 ha (3,000 acres) and 80 million annual passengers, Heathrow Airport is the biggest and busiest airport in Europe.

Thursday, 13 June 2019, London, United Kingdom – Heathrow Airport, the primary international airport for London and major global hub airport, has a problem. Despite handling 80 million annual passengers last year, it only has two runways. For context, LAX has four runways. Rival European airports like Madrid Airport, or Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, also have four runways. Amsterdam Airport has six and Dallas-Fort Worth has seven. With just two runways at Heathrow, London’s international hub is just barely squeaking by. It continually suffers from overcrowding and delays, and a TripAdvisor poll rated it as the worst airport in the world.

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Lost at sea for 438 days

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Featured Image: Jose Salvador Alvarenga, pictured above, upon his arrival in the Marshall Islands after being lost at sea continuously for 438 days.

Thursday, 2 May 2019, Mexico City, Mexico – World records. There are all kinds of them and pretty much anyone can set one. Most importantly, people try to break world records that have already been set in the past. But one world record that nobody wants to break for sure, is the world record for the longest amount of time spent lost at sea. Jose Salvador Alvarenga, an El Salvador native and a fisherman working in Mexico, holds this world record – he was lost in a boat in the Pacific Ocean for a mind-boggling 438 days. That’s over a year! Even more staggering is the distance he ended up travelling – he floated, in a 25-foot-long fishing boat, from Mexico to the Marshall Islands, more than halfway across the Pacific Ocean.

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Fish Yogurt – Update

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Featured Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin announces his interest in either dissolving or privatising the Russian State Yogurt Corporation, branded as YogCorp. For more information, check out our first blog post on fish yogurt.

Monday, 6 February 2018, Moscow, Russia – When you consider the stress of militarily invading other countries, suppressing the political opposition, cracking down on gay people, and dealing with an ongoing scandal of interfering with a foreign country’s democratic elections, one could say that Russian President Vladimir Putin has a pretty busy schedule. But for some reason, Putin has found time to make a surprise press release Sunday in regards to Russia’s failing fish yogurt industry. Specifically, Putin says he wants to work with the State Duma to eventually privatise or dissolve the российская государственная йогуртная корпорация (Rossiyskaya Gosudarstvennaya Yogurtnaya Korporatsiya, RGYK) (Russian State Yogurt Corporation), commonly known as YogCorp.

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Australia Day

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Featured Image: Australia Day is supposed to represent all Australians, but controversy still lingers over its symbolisation of the struggle of the country’s Aboriginal peoples.

Saturday, 26 January 2019, Sydney, Australia – Today is Australia Day, Australia’s equivalent of America’s Fourth of July. On this day the Australian Government’s official celebrations include citizenship ceremonies, awards and knighthoods, and a controversial re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet. Indeed, Australia Day commemorates the anniversary of the arrival of British ships in Australia on 26 January 1788, to claim British sovereignty over the country’s eastern coast. And this simple fact has generated enormous controversy surrounding the discrimination, subjugation, and near-extermination of Australia’s indigenous peoples.

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Saudi Arabia and Arms

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Featured Image: More than 16,000 civilians have been killed in Yemen’s civil war, with most deaths caused by airstrikes (Washington Post)

13 January 2019, Cairo, Egypt – On 9 August 2018, a fighter jet, belonging to a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and consisting of other regional allies, dropped a bomb on a busy marketplace in a small village in Yemen. The bomb ended up falling on a school bus and killed 40 children inside. The Saudi coalition has conducted thousands of these airstrikes in Yemen, and they have intentionally targeted civilians a third of the time. The United Nations has denounced the attacks on civilians as possible war crimes. And it was later found that the bomb that killed the children on the school bus was made by the Lockheed Martin Corporation. This bomb was made right here in the U.S. and it’s being used to target civilians in Yemen.

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Colombia’s Hippo Problem

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Featured image: Hippos

Sunday, 16 December 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Pablo Escobar (1949-1993) was the most powerful drug lord ever and the richest criminal in history. His Medellin Cartel supplied 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the United States, and by the time of his death in 1993 his estimated net worth was 25 to 30 billion dollars. Pablo Escobar’s power, wealth, and violence created huge problems for Colombia, but everyone forgets about another problem that he created for the county: hundreds of invasive hippos.

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California Wildfires

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Featured Image: The Paradise, California inferno known as the Camp Fire has been the deadliest on record, with 71 deaths so far confirmed.

Saturday, 17 November 2018, San Francisco, CA – The California wildfires, in particular the Camp Fire in Paradise and Chico and the Woolsey Fire in Ventura, are the most destructive wildfires in the history of California, with 71 people dead, a quarter million acres burned, and over 1,000 people who are unaccounted for in casualties. Air quality in Chico reached 365 AQI on November 15, making it the worst air quality in the entire world. And 20,000 people living in the town of Paradise have been evacuated from their homes, living in shelters and with nowhere to go.

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