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Smart drones to be tested in battle against East African locust swarms

Ethiopia locusts

Nairobi, Kenya Thomson Reuters Foundation The United Nations is to test drones equipped with mapping sensors and atomisers to spray pesticides in parts of east Africa battling an invasion of desert locusts that are ravaging crops and exacerbating a hunger crisis.  Hundreds of millions of the voracious insects have swept across Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya […]

GOD’S HOSTAGE

Gods Hostage

For February and March, 2020 – we’re reading American Andrew Brunson’s account of his arrest and imprisonment in Turkey, God’s Hostage: A True Story of Persecution, Imprisonment, and Perseverance.

‘Parasite’ from South Korea makes Oscar history with best picture win

Oscars Parasite

Los Angeles Reuters South Korean social satire Parasite won the Oscar for best picture on Sunday, making history as the first film not in the English language to win the movie industry’s highest honour. Parasite, about the gap between rich and poor in modern Seoul, won a total of four Oscars, including best director and […]

Bangkok court halts river promenade project that would worsen flooding

Bangkok River

Bangkok, Thailand Thomson Reuters Foundation A court in Bangkok has asked the city’s authorities to stop work on a riverside promenade that urban planners and environmentalists said would worsen flooding and uproot hundreds of families dependent on the river to make a living. The administrative court last Wednesday told the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration that the […]

Who is Indigenous? Millions may be denied land in India’s Assam over definition

Villager Assam

Guwahati, India Thomson Reuters Foundation Millions of migrants and tribal people in India’s north-eastern Assam state could be denied land because of a new definition of the term “Indigenous”, land and human rights experts said. Assam has a long-simmering movement against immigrants and its 2019 land policy, aimed at overhauling a three-decade old land law, […]