Category: News & Announcement

A project described as the U.K.’s first consumer-owned wind farm has been launched, as the way people power their homes continues to change. In an announcement Monday, London based start-up Ripple Energy said the Graig Fatha wind farm in Wales would be “owned by the consumers it supplies.” The one turbine, 2.5 megawatt facility is set to come online in 2021 and Ripple Energy has partnered with two other firms, Octopus Energy and Co-op Energy, to send electricity from the facility to people’s homes. Customers will need to be on…

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Swarms of locusts spreading across Pakistan are emerging as a bigger threat to the economy than the coronavirus pandemic, with the pests threatening farm output, livelihoods and food security. The locust-invasion now covers an area of 57 million hectares in a country with a total crop area of 23 million hectares, said Falak Naz, director general of crop protection at the Ministry of Food Security and Research. While not all the areas infested now are crop lands, the insects are moving fast, he said. Agriculture is the second-biggest sector in…

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The generals are back in control in Pakistan — unofficially that is. There’s now more than a dozen former and current military officials in prominent government roles, such as running the state-owned air carrier, the power regulator and the National Institute of Health, which is leading the country’s pandemic response. Three of those appointments happened in the last two months. PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN-UN-REFUGEESImran Khan Photographer: Aamir Qureshi/AFP via Getty ImagesThe military’s heightened profile comes as Prime Minister Imran Khan sees his influence and popularity dwindle due to a slowing economy, high consumer…

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The era of the U.S. dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s primary reserve currency is coming to an end. Then French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing coined that phrase in the 1960s largely out of frustration, bemoaning a U.S. that drew freely on the rest of the world to support its over-extended standard of living. For almost 60 years, the world complained but did nothing about it. Those days are over. Already stressed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. living standards are about to be squeezed as never before.…

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Leadership may be hard to define, but in times of crisis it is easy to identify. As the pandemic has spread fear, disease and death, national leaders across the globe have been severely tested. Some have fallen short, sometimes dismally, but there are also those leaders who have risen to the moment, demonstrating resolve, courage, empathy, respect for science and elemental decency, and thereby dulling the impact of the disease on their people. The master class on how to respond belongs to Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New…

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