Category: Life & Style

Israel has launched its first tourist marine nature reserve in the Mediterranean Sea off the country’s northern coast, Israel Nature and Parks Authority has said.

Rosh Hanikra-Akhziv Marine Reserve spans approximately 7 km of coastline, and encompasses bays from the Lebanese border to Nahariya. It extends 15 km westward into the sea and covers over 100 square km.

The protected site is the second tourist marine reserve in Israel, after the Eilat Coral Beach Nature Reserve in the Red Sea, and the largest of the nine marine reserves in the country with an area of more than 100 square km.

The reserve protects the flora and fauna on the coastline, underwater, on four islands, and in an 850-meter-deep underwater canyon. Monk seals, 13 species of cartilaginous fish, and nests of many bird species, including some rare species, were earlier observed in the reserve area. The site also contains Israel’s largest population of grouper fish, Mediterranean slipper lobsters, various sea anemones, snails, urchins and cucumbers, as well as many other marine species.

In addition to marine nature reserves, Israel also plans to establish marine national parks to protect ancient coastal cities with their ports and various heritage sites near the beach or at sea.

New York has overtaken Hong Kong to become the world’s 20 most expensive cities to live in as an expatriate due to rising inflation and accommodation costs, said the ECA International’s Cost of Living Rankings for 2023.

Hong Kong, Geneva and London stand at the second, third and fourth places.

Singapore climbed from 13th place last year to enter the top five for the first time, breaking the general trend among Asian cities of coming down the rankings, partially due to lower rates of inflation compared to other regions.

The biggest mover of the year was Istanbul, which climbed 95 spots to 108th place, due to an 80 percent rise in prices driven by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s economic policies, said the report.

The survey also found that Dubai rents rose by almost one third on an influx of Russian expatriates, pushing the city up to 12th place. While most European cities rose in rankings, Norwegian and Swedish cities fell on weak currencies and French cities slipped on lower inflation rates in comparison to their EU peers. Chinese cities slipped in the rankings due to the impact of a weaker currency and lower inflation rates relative to other countries.

Rankings for all US cities became better due to the strong dollar and high inflation, with San Francisco making to the top 10.

Singapore has decided to end its famous sport of horse racing – practised for more than 180 years – 2024 when the city-state’s only racecourse will close and be redeveloped for housing.

The Singapore Turf Club (STC) in Kranji will hold its last race meeting, the 100th Grand Singapore Gold Cup, on October 5, 2024 and end operations in March 2027, handing over the 120-hectare site to the government.

Located at Farrer Park in central Singapore, the STC was established by Scottish merchant William Henry Macleod Read in 1842. It moved to a larger venue, Bukit Timah in the western part of the island, as the race grew in popularity. In 1999, the STC relocated to Kranji in northwestern Singapore. The current racecourse has a five-storey grandstand with capacity for 30,000 spectators.

The government has announced that racehorse owners and trainers will be offered support for horse maintenance and exportation. News reports say that the club has about 700 racehorses and 38 livery horses for personal use. The racecourse site will be used for housing, including public housing, with other potential uses including leisure and recreation that are under consideration.

Senior officials from about 12 of the world’s major intelligence agencies held a secret meeting on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue security meeting in Singapore on 2–4 June, said media reports.

Organised by the Singapore government, these meetings have been discreetly held at a separate venue alongside the security summit for several years, they said. The meetings were not previously reported.

Director of National Intelligence, US, Avril Haines represented her country’s intelligence community. China was among the other countries present. Samant Goel, the head of India’s overseas intelligence gathering agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, also attended the meeting.

All five sources who discussed the meetings declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. However, a spokesperson for the Singapore Ministry of Defence said that while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue that the Singapore Ministry of Defence may facilitate some of these bilateral or multilateral meetings.

The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand operate what is called the Five Eyes Alliance to gather and share a broad range of intelligence. The intelligence officials of these nations, thus, meet frequently. Larger meetings of the intelligence community are rarer, and almost never made public.

Indian nationals top the tally of skilled worker and student visas issued by the United Kingdom over the past year, according to the data shared by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in London in May.

The ONS data collated by the UK Home Office shows that Indian nationals were the top nationality for cross-sector skilled work, including specifically targeted healthcare visas aimed at filling staff shortages in the National Health Service (NHS). The nationality also made up the largest group of students granted visas under the new Graduate post-study work route with 41 percent of grants.

The UK granted 92,951 Graduate route extensions to previous students in the year ending March 2023. Indian nationals represented the largest group of students granted leave to remain on this route. In the ‘Worker’ category, they were the top nationality for visas, representing one third (33 per cent) of grants. They were also the top nationality for both the Skilled Worker and Skilled Worker – Health and Care visas. The skilled worker visas granted to Indians increased 63 percent, from 13,390 in 2021-22 to 21,837 in 2022-23. In the healthcare visa category, Indians registered a 105 percent hike from 14,485 to 29,726.

Scientists have identified the oldest known Homo sapiens footprints in South Africa. The newly discovered tracks have been dated to over 150,000 years ago.

A wealth of fossil evidence suggests that Homo sapiens first diverged from earlier species about 300,000 years ago. The international team of scientists has identified the oldest known set of fossil footprints from a member of our species. The team calculated the dates of seven “ichnosites” (locations containing ancient human traces) along South Africa’s Cape south coast. It was found that they ranged between 71,000 and 153,000 years old.

The researchers have dated the South African footprints using optically stimulated luminescence. In this method, scientists take grains of quartz and other minerals from a sample, and expose them to ionising radiation. The way the grains fluoresce after this exposure can reveal how long it has been since they last saw sunlight. The tracks on the Cape south coast are particularly well-suited to being dated through this method, as they were made in wet sand dunes that are rich in quartz grains and then quickly covered, by new sand blowing over them.

The team said more ichnosites are likely to be discovered in the area, and could provide more information in understanding human history.

In a first, France has decided to ban short domestic flights for journeys possible in less than two-and-a-half hours by train, with the objective to reduce carbon emissions from aircraft. Accordingly, flights will not operate between Paris and regional hubs such as Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux. The government has also specified that the train services on these routes would be frequent and well-connected.

With the move, city hopping within the European nation is grounded. Travellers looking to fly within France will no longer be able to take a short domestic flight when there is alternative high-speed rail service. The move is part of the country’s larger commitment to decarbonise transport, which accounts for 30 percent of emissions, according to the statement. According to the French Directorate General for Civil Aviation, this ban will cut 55,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

So far, only three routes, not including connecting flights, have been affected: Paris-Orly airport between Nantes, Bordeaux and Lyon. The routes represent 2.5 percent of France’s annual domestic flights. The country plans to evaluate the decree’s success in three years and possibly ban more routes.

In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron had suggested domestic flights of less than four hours to be banned if someone could just take the train. The two-and-a-half-hour ban was introduced in 2021 after pushback from airline companies such as Air France-KLM.

Luxury car maker Bugatti has revealed the designs for its 42-storey skyscraper in Dubai. The building – the company’s first foray into residential real estate – will have two garage-to-penthouse car lifts.

Bugatti is one of the luxury car brands that have moved into residential property. Bentley is building a 61-storey skyscraper in Miami Beach, while Aston Martin has designed an angular black home in New York as part of its Automotive Galleries and Lairs service.

Bugatti’s new construction will be built in the Business Bay area of Dubai. The skyscraper will have a sinuous form wrapped in balconies on every level. It will have 171 apartments and 11 penthouses. Its form and its interiors are inspired by the heritage of the luxury car brand founded in 1909. The building is being built in partnership with Dubai-developer Binghatti.

Each of the apartments in Bugatti’s skyscraper will have a unique shape with access to a curved balcony, while the building will be topped with a pool. The penthouses will be served by a pair of garage-to-penthouse car lifts, which will allow the owners to drive their vehicles directly into these apartments. Bentley’s Miami skyscraper will also have a car lift to allow residents to drive vehicles directly into apartments on all levels.

Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, has become the first Bulgarian novel to win the International Booker Prize.

The novel is about “a ‘clinic for the past’ [that] offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But soon the past begins to invade the present,” said the International Booker Prize website. Full of irony and melancholy, the novel deals with a contemporary question: what happens to us when our memories disappear?

“Georgi Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us,” said Leïla Slimani, chair of judges, International Booker Prize, about Time Shelter.

Gospodinov is a Bulgarian poet, writer and playwright. Reports say that when Time Shelter was published in Bulgaria, it topped the book charts and won the Strega European Prize.

International Booker Prize is meant specifically for books written in other languages and translated into English. Last year, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, had become the first Hindi novel to win the International Booker. The prize is awarded annually for the finest single work of fiction from around the world that has been translated into English and published in the UK and Ireland.

Brazil’s environmental authority declined to issue a licence for a contentious offshore oil drilling project at the mouth of the Amazon River on May 17.

The decision to reject the state-run oil company Petrobras’ request to drill the FZA-M-59 block was taken “as a function of a group of technical inconsistencies,” said the agency’s head, underlining environmental concerns. 

Eighty civil society and environmental bodies, including WWF Brasil and Greenpeace, had called for the license to be rejected. The biodiverse area is home to little-studied patches of mangroves and a coral reef. The activists and experts had said the project risked leaks that could imperil this sensitive environment.

In the initial presidential terms of Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2003 to 2010, massive offshore discoveries helped finance health, education and welfare programs in Brazil. However, this changed in recent years, with the protection of the Amazon becoming an important element in the leader’s campaign to return to the presidency. Activists and experts had warned that the approval for the offshore oil project could not only threaten the natural world, but also dent Lula’s brand new image as an environmental champion.

The process to obtain an environmental license for the FZA-M-59 block began in 2014, and exploration rights were transferred to Petrobras in 2020. 

Other controversial projects in the Amazon that are under discussion include repaving a highway that would cut through the preserved rainforest, construction of a major railway for grain transport, and renewal of the license of a giant hydroelectric dam.