NYT: Are Pacific Islands a ‘Dumping Ground’ for Accused Priests?
Over a decades-long period, more than 30 Catholic priests and missionaries moved to remote island nations after they had allegedly abused children in the West, or had been found to do so.
Hmmm…
Electrek: Toyota slashes EV production plans by 30% after notifying suppliers
According to _Nikkei_, Toyota notified suppliers of the changes on Friday, citing a slowing global EV market.
Japan’s largest automaker is lowering its global EV production goal to 1 million by 2026. The update comes after Toyota announced plans last May to sell 1.5 million EVs by 2026.
The new plans call for building 400,000 electric cars in 2025, doubling that number to 1 million by the following year.
Although Toyota is cutting EV production, it still expects a big jump in sales from the 104,018 electric cars sold in 2023. Through the first seven months of 2024, Toyota has sold about 80,000 EVs.
Time to Say Goodbye to the B.M.I.?
The body mass index has long been criticized as a flawed indicator of health. A replacement has been gaining support: the body roundness index.
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“Based on B.M.I., Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a bodybuilder would have been categorized as obese and needing to lose weight,” said Dr. Wajahat Mehal, director of the Metabolic Health and Weight Loss Program at Yale University.
“But as soon as you measured his waist, you’d see, ‘Oh, it’s 32 inches.'”
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A paper published in JAMA Network Open in June was the latest in a string of studies to report that B.R.I. is a promising predictor of mortality. B.R.I. scores generally run from 1 to 15; most people rank between 1 and 10. Among a nationally representative sample of 33,000 Americans, B.R.I. scores rose between 1999 and 2018, the new study found.
NYT: There Are Only Two Shakers Left. They’ve Still Got Utopia in Their Sights.
Out of the tens of thousands of Shakers who have lived out their faith in the last quarter-millennium, these two remain.
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Because of Sister June’s age and health, her role in the community is a private one, and it is Brother Arnold who serves as the head of the religion, the village leader, the farmer, gardener, shepherd, printer, housekeeper, cook, baker, author, editor, historian, spokesman and elder. This, he admits, is not what he imagined when he became a Shaker at age 21. He never wanted to lead a religion. When he arrived, he’d never dealt with sheep.
In case you were wondering…
Ukrainian community leaders are planning a legal challenge to keep secret the names of alleged Nazi war criminals who came to Canada after the Second World War.
They have started to raise funds for a Federal Court action to be triggered if Ottawa decides to release a report naming hundreds of alleged Nazi war criminals who settled in Canada, including those who fought in a Ukrainian SS division.
Globe: Ukrainian officials call for documentary on Russian soldiers to be removed from TIFF
Ukrainian officials are urging the Toronto International Film Festival to cancel screenings of a documentary that follows Russian soldiers fighting against Ukraine, saying the film is propaganda that whitewashes their war crimes.
The film, Russians at War, by Russian-Canadian documentary filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova, screened at the Venice Film Festival, and is set to be shown for the first time in North America at TIFF next week.
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Ms. Trofimova issued a statement on Friday in response to what she described as attacks and accusations being directed toward her and the film.
“I want to be clear that this Canada-France co-production is an anti-war film made at great risk to all involved, myself especially,” she said. “I unequivocally believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unjustified, illegal and acknowledge the validity of the International Criminal Court investigation of war crimes in Ukraine.”
Globe: How the running shoe industry has gone wild with innovation this year once again
A running shoe and apparel company recently launched a cutting-edge, laceless, robot-made racing sneaker; Olympians wore them in Paris, and soon, for a crisp $450, you will be able to don them, too.
The Swiss brand On made the sports world gasp in July when it released its latest running shoe, the Cloudboom Strike LS (short for Light Spray). The upper of the shoe is made from a single piece of stringy material which is sprayed and woven into the shape of a foot by a robot arm at the company’s headquarters in Zurich, and then thermally fused onto a bouncy midsole. The sneaker takes three minutes to make, weighs a feather-light 170 grams, and has no shoelaces, because the material is malleable and moulds itself into the shape of the wearer’s foot without need for extra tightening. As an added bonus, the localized manufacturing process emits 75 per cent less CO2 than is emitted making a regular shoe upper.
I’m sure they still have room to make a more expensive shoe.
Globe: Norway’s high-stakes gamble on sustainable salmon farming
If you’ve eaten salmon in the past few decades, chances are it was farmed: 70 per cent of this type of fish comes from farms.
Transforming salmo salar into salmo domesticus took around a decade — lightning fast as far as animal husbandry is concerned. It started in the 1960s with two brothers on a windswept island in the Norwegian Sea, who suspended juvenile salmon in nets and fed them chopped-up herring. When the fish grew fat and ready for consumption, the brothers sold them for a healthy profit — just as wild stocks were dwindling. Within a little more than a decade, domesticated salmon was a going concern, and the basis for a growing global industry.
There are now countless salmon farms around the world, engaged in breeding that selects for animals that quickly gain fat. Wild salmon will eat roughly 10 pounds of food for every one pound they gain. Because of genetic breeding, the farmed salmon aboard the ocean farm eat just 1.22 pounds for every pound gained, according to Nordlaks. This makes salmon one of the most efficient of the farmed meats; for context, a cow’s feed conversion ratio hovers around 6 to 1.
Globe: Two astronauts are left behind in space as Boeing’s troubled capsule returns to Earth empty
Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.
Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.
It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Starliner’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks.
Last Updated: 06.Sep.2024 23:44 EDT
