South Africa has announced plans to ban breeding of captive lions for hunting. New policy will end legal lion bone trade & tourist experiences like petting cubs, which are destined to be sold to slaughter-houses or shot by hunters once they become too big to be handled. Almost 15,000 lions are held on 300 commercial farms in South Africa. The only country that allows large-scale lion-breeding with animals kept in fenced enclosures. Thousands of farmed lions born into a life of misery in cruel commercial breeding facilities will get a new life. Lions in captivity for trophy hunting or for tourists to pet will be released in the wild, a more authentic experience for visitors.
A big win for big cats, conservation & wildlife! This will ensure lions remain where they belong – in the wild.
Heart-rending stories of Covid-19 suffering, loss & grief. India is in the throes of one of it’s darkest moments as a catastrophic 2nd Covid-19 wave tears through it with snow-balling speed. B.1.617.2 is the name of it’s dangerously virulent variant, adding fuel to fire. Infections have cut across social, economic & geographic divides. Turmoil has been intensified by a crippling shortage of life-saving supplies like oxygen.
As hospitals run out of beds, people are forced to find ways to get treatment for sick patients at home. Many have turned to the black market where prices of essential medicines, oxygen concentrators have sky-rocketed. Questionable drugs are proliferating. People are dying at doorsteps of hospitals as they can’t afford to buy life-saving help, lack of emergency healthcare. Oxygen suppliers ask for 10 times more than the normal price. Struggles are huge for getting a blood test, CT scan, x-ray. Labs are overrun, days for test results. Makes it hard for doctors to assess the progression of disease. Unfortunately, many people have been left to their own fate, needing compassion & generosity.
A comprehensive & sumptuous survey that celebrates the beauty of flowers throughout art, history & culture. A journey across continents to discover endless ways artists & image makers have created floral motifs. Colour illustrations showcase the diversity of blooms from all over the world. Flower spans a wide range of styles & media from art, botanical illustrations, sculptures, floral arrangements, film stills, textiles. Visually stunning.
Features large scale images, accessible texts. Flower is a wonderful read with works by iconic artists. Entries selected by an international panel of art historians, museum curators, botanists, florists & horticulturalists. Flower is a great gift with a breathtaking collection of botanical prints, photos, drawings & micrograph scans.
The Covid-19 situation in India is beyond heart-breaking. A catastrophic 2nd wave. Painful. An aggressive surge has seen patients families begging for oxygen, life-saving drugs. No availability of hospital beds, medicines, injections. Patients need millions of oxygen concentrators, pre-fabricated mobile field hospitals, oxygen generation plants, testing & PPE kits. Above all, vaccines.
Each time I call, someone I know has lost their life or needs urgent medications. Compassion. Remdesivir, Tocilizumabare selling at the price of gold, if lucky. Hospitals are fragile, crumbling under the strain of the pandemic. India’s infection & death rates are growing exponentially. Overwhelming. Struggle to track new variants could worsen the crisis. But, there’s hope as the international community steps in to support. Humanity at it’s best. An incredibly co-operative, generous spirit with foreign aid trickling in.
A few requests to share perspectives on online education. COVID-19 has resulted in schools shut all across the world. Globally, over 1.2 billion children are out of the classroom. Education has changed dramatically with a distinctive rise in e-learning, remote learning on digital platforms. Online learning shows an increase in retention of information, offers fun & flexible learning time.
With a sudden shift away from classrooms around the globe, we’re wondering whether the adoption of online learning will continue to persist post-pandemic. Even before COVID-19, there was already a high growth & adoption in education technology with global ed-tech investments reaching US$150 billion in 2020. Overall market for online education is projected to reach $350 Billion by 2025. Whether it is language apps, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools or online learning software, there’s been a significant surge in usage since COVID-19.
In response to significant demand, online learning platforms like BYJU’s are offering free access to services. Tencent classroom has been used extensively after Chinese government instructed a quarter of a billion students to resume their studies online due to Covid-19. This resulted in the largest online movement in the history of education. Free online courses from Ivy League Schools in the US.
While some believe the unplanned, rapid move to online learning with low training, insufficient bandwidth, the digital divide & little preparation will result in a poor learning experience, others believe a new hybrid model of education will emerge. The integration of information technology in education will be accelerating. Online education will become an integral component of overall school education. Students will be able to learn at their own pace – reading, skipping, accelerating through concepts as they choose. We need affordable, easy, effective collaboration tools & innovative engagement methods that promote inclusion, personalisation, passion, curiosity & intelligence.
From William Wordsworth’s spring-time daffodils, Christina Rossetti’s birdsong to John Keats’s autumnal odes & Longfellow’s ‘Woods in Winter‘, poems pay tribute to the beauty of nature & the seasons. Works from wonderful writers as William Blake, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Keats, Amy Lowell, Shakespeare take us through the year with 12 evocative black & white line drawings. Beautiful poems – Thomas Hardy’s ‘Birds at Winter Nightfall’, Robert Frost’s ‘Spring Pools’, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Glory of the Garden’, Elizabeth Jennings’s ‘Song at the Beginning of Autumn‘.
