AFP UK

A female rhinoceros drowned at a zoo in the Netherlands after a first date with a new male went tragically wrong, the zoo said on Friday.

Elena was “startled” on Thursday by the arrival of a white rhino named Limpopo at the Wildlands zoo in the eastern city of Emmen near the German border.

After a chase the exhausted female slipped into a waterhole, at which point zookeepers lured the bull rhino away from her.

“Unfortunately, this help came too late for Elena and she had already drowned,” the zoo said in a statement.

The 19-year-old Limpopo had arrived at the park in early September from another Dutch zoo where he sired three offspring as part of a European breeding programme.

The male and the Wildlands zoo’s two female rhinos, sisters Elena and Zahra, started getting to know each other by smelling and seeing each other in separate pens.

The “most exciting” part, the zoo said, was planned for Thursday morning, before visitors arrived, when Limpopo was allowed into the area where the females were grazing.

“From that moment on it became restless: both women were startled by the male and instead of putting him in his place together, they both ran off,” it said.

“As a result, Limpopo gave chase. He seemed particularly focused on Elena, because she was the closest to him.” 

Both animals appeared exhausted after 15 minutes, and Elena slipped into a shallow pool of water, landed on her side and was unable to get up, the zoo said.

Caretakers were unable to stop her drowning.

– Limpopo’s past problems –

Stunned zoo vet Job Stumpel paid tribute to the “beautiful, sweet, stable and calm” Elena

“You want to jump over there and lift her head above water but you couldn’t. Rhinos are not only very dangerous, but they also weigh almost 2,000 kilos (4,409 pounds),” he told AD newspaper. 

“We raced to it with a shovel and chased the male away with it, so we could get to the female, but it was too late.”

The zoo said such an introduction “often requires intervention, but never before has one been fatal”.

Limpopo had been moved from a German zoo six years ago because he “didn’t treat the female there properly”, the Brabants Dagblad newspaper said.

In his most recent home, the Beekse Bergen safari park near Tilburg in the southern Netherlands, he was a “proven breeder” living with a herd of six females.

The southern white rhino is listed as “near threatened” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, with 10,080 animals in existence.

Rhinos are killed for their horns, highly prized across Asia for traditional and medicinal purposes.

But breeding them is difficult, as a female only gives birth to a calf once every three to four years, after a 16-month pregnancy, the zoo said.

The world’s tallest country is shrinking.

The generation of Dutch people born in 2001 is shorter than the one born in 1980, a study by the country’s statistics office said on Friday.

Lofty Dutch 19-year-old men currently measure an average of 182.9 cm (six feet) tall, and women are on average 169.3 cm (five feet seven inches) tall.

Factors including immigration and diet are likely to be responsible for the change in height, which reverses a century and a half of rapid growth, the study said.

“In the course of the last century we have become taller and taller, but since 1980 the growth has stopped,” it said.

“The men born in 2001 were on average 1 cm shorter than the generation from 1980, women 1.4 cm on average.”

But all is not lost.

“The Netherlands is still the tallest nation in the world,” the Central Bureau for Statistics said in a statement.

Dutchmen rank first above Montenegro, Estonia and Bosnia, while the women are above Montenegro, Denmark and Iceland, it said, citing 2020 figures from the Non-Communicable Disease Risk Factor Collaboration, a global network of health scientists.

The smallest men are in East Timor while the smallest women are in Guatemala.

– ‘Unhealthy eating habits’ –

The full reasons for the Dutch comedown are not entirely clear.

One reason was immigration, “especially of people with a non-Western background”, whom the study said tend to be smaller on average.

But growth had also “stagnated” among Dutch people whose parents and grandparents were born in the Netherlands, it said.

Men had not got any taller since 1980 while there was a “downward trend” among women.

That could be because of a “biological limit” but was also likely linked to “unhealthy eating habits and excessive energy intake in the growing up phase”.

The study was based on self-measurements of 719,000 Dutch people aged 19 to 60.

The Dutch were not always so lanky.

At the start of the 19th century they were small by European standards and only started to shoot up in the 1840s.

Even a century ago the United States and Scandinavia produced the tallest men, and it was not until the generation born in the late 1950s that the Dutch took the title.

The question of why the Dutch are so tall remains unclear.

A popular myth — that the cheese-loving Dutch consume a lot of dairy products — is discounted by scientists.

Increased prosperity as well as “natural selection in which taller men and women had more children than shorter couples” is likely the real reason, the statistics bureau said.

Rich countries are making little progress towards meeting their pledge to provide $100 billion a year to poorer nations to combat climate change, the OECD said Friday.

Developing countries, which bear the greatest impact from climate change, received $79.6 billion in 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said in its latest report on the issue.

That is more than $20 billion below what wealthy nations promised to give every year starting from 2020 to help poorer countries curb their carbon footprint and cope with future climate impacts.

The 2019 figure is the most recent available and marked a two percent increase from the year earlier, a sharp slowdown from the rates of earlier years.

And watchdog groups have warned that even those numbers may be inflated.

“The limited progress in overall climate finance volumes between 2018 and 2019 is disappointing, particularly ahead of COP26 (the UN climate summit in November),” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said in a statement.

“While appropriately verified data for 2020 will not be available until early next year it is clear that that climate finance will remain well short of its target,” he said. 

“More needs to be done. We know that donor countries recognise this,” he said, adding that Canada and Germany are moving forward a plan to mobilise the additional finance required to reach the $100 billion annual goal.

Meanwhile, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is still unknown.

Low income countries have been hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 crisis, with waves of disease and lockdowns wreaking economic havoc, even as climate change-driven disasters and threats continue to mount. 

Public climate finance from developed countries accounted for the lion’s share of the 2019 figure, some $62.9 billion, with another $2.6 billion in government-backed export credits.

The rest, some $14 billion, came from private investment mobilised by public mechanisms.

The 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen mandated that poorer nations were to receive the $100 billion and the pledge was renewed in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But where the money was to come from and how it would be allocated were not spelt out, which has made tracking progress toward that goal both difficult and disputed.

The promise has been a recurring source of anger in poor countries and it will likely be a key point of contention at the crunch UN climate talks in Glasgow in November.

Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth Friday after completing the country’s longest-ever crewed mission, the latest landmark in Beijing’s drive to become a major space power.

The capsule carrying the trio deployed its parachute and landed in the Gobi desert at 1:34 pm local time (0534 GMT).

“It feels very good to be back!,” Tang Hongbo told state broadcaster CCTV after the 90-day mission, a record for China.

“I want to say dad, mom, I’m back! In good health and good spirits!” he said after emerging from the capsule within 30 minutes of landing.

The crew of the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft were in good health, China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement.

“The first manned mission to the (Chinese) space station is a complete success,” it said.

The taikonauts — as Chinese astronauts are known — will undergo a 14-day quarantine before they can go home “because their immune systems may have weakened after the long mission,” Huang Weifen, chief designer of China’s manned space project told CCTV.

The mission was part of China’s heavily promoted space programme, which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.

The launch of Beijing’s first crewed mission in nearly five years coincided with the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on July 1, and was the highlight of a massive propaganda campaign.

The crew stayed for 90 days at the Tiangong space station, conducting spacewalks and scientific experiments.

“The successful completion of the mission… paves the way for future regular missions and utilisation of the (Chinese space) station,” said Chen Lan, an independent analyst at GoTaikonauts, which specialises in China’s space programme.

“It is a very important and very much needed start for the CSS.”

Tiangong, meaning “heavenly palace”, is expected to operate for at least 10 years.

The mission is headed by Nie Haisheng, a decorated air force pilot in the People’s Liberation Army who previously participated in two space missions.

The two other astronauts, Liu Boming and Tang, are also in the military.

– Space race –

The Chinese space agency is planning a total of 11 launches before the end of next year, including three more crewed missions that will deliver two lab modules to expand the 70-tonne station.

China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme in recent years as it tries to catch up with the United States and Russia. 

Beijing’s space ambitions have been fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan.

The ISS is due for retirement after 2024, although NASA has said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.

“Compared to the US, China is still technically somewhat behind,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told AFP.

“The main US lead in human spaceflight is in total experience,” he said.

“For example, two spacewalks is not the same as hundreds of ISS spacewalks. Quantity makes a difference.”

Nothing to eat, nothing to plant. The last rain in Ifotaka fell in May, for two hours.

Across Madagascar’s vast southern tip, drought has transformed fields into dust bowls. More than one million people face famine.

Across tens of thousands of acres, the countryside is desolate. Harvest season begins in October, leaving long, lean weeks before the meagre crops come in.

Some villages are abandoned. In others, people should be working the fields, but instead are languishing at home. There’s nothing to reap.

Hunger weighs people down, both in mind and body. They move slowly, and struggle to follow conversation.

“I feel sick, and worried. Every day I wonder what we’re going to eat,” says Helmine Sija, 60 and a mother of six, in a village called Atoby.

– Eating cactus and weeds –

A petite woman with grey hair and a hardened face, Sija tends a boiling pot of cactus in front of her home. She chopped the pricks off with a machete to prepare them for cooking.

It can’t really be called food. The concoction has little nutritional value, but it’s a popular appetite suppressant, even though it causes stomach aches.

Her three oldest children have left home to look for work in other towns. She’s caring for the young ones. 

“I want to move somewhere more fertile, where I can farm. But I don’t have enough money to leave,” she says.

Arzel Jonarson, 47, a former cassava farm worker, now gathers firewood to sell, earning about a 25 US cents a week. Enough to buy one bowl of rice.

In Ankilidoga, an elderly couple and their daughter are making a meal of wild herbs, which they season with salt to cut the bitterness. In better times, these were cast off as weeds. But their crops of corn, cassava and sweet potato have failed.

Their village does have a reservoir to collect rain water. No one can remember the last time it was full.

“I haven’t received any aid for two months,” said Kazy Zorotane, a 30-year-old single mother of four. “That last time, in June, the government gave me some money.”

About $26 (22 euros).

– Climate crisis –

Malnutrition afflicts southern Madagascar regularly. But the current drought is the worst in 40 years, according to the United Nations, which blames climate change for the crisis.

Around the town of Ifotaka, people said the government had brought some rice, beans and oil. But that was in August. Of 500 people designated for financial aid, about 90 received the $26.

Doctors Without Borders has dispatched a mobile clinic to travel from village to village. Children clutch at packets of “plumpy”, a peanut butter-flavoured paste designed to help the severely malnourished.

Through the waiting crowds, nurses and aides spot the most urgent cases, guiding them to the front of the line. Small children are weighed in a blue bucket.

Measuring tapes are wrapped around their tiny arms, to get an indication of just how acutely malnourished they are. 

In Befeno, another village, nine-year-old Zapedisoa came with his grandmother. He’s sluggish, his eyes look vacant. At 20 kilos (44 pounds), he’s showing alarming symptoms, and is given medicine and food supplements.

Satinompeo, a five-year-old with short hair, weighs only 11 kilos. She’s severely malnourished, but she’s terrified of the doctors. She hangs onto her father’s yellow shorts and cries. 

Families are sent home with a two-week food supply, based on the number of children in the house.

In Fenoaivo, two sisters and a brother, all retirees, share a home.

“It’s been a long time since we grew anything. On good, days, the three of us share a bowl of rice,” said Tsafaharie, 69. 

At another home in this town, a 45-year-old man holds watch over his father’s body. 

While it is hard to determine an accurate death toll from hunger, that is why he died in in June, his family say.

“We don’t have enough money to buy a (cow) to feed mourners, so we can’t have a funeral,” Tsihorogne Monja said. 

The corpse is in a separate hut, partially covered by a cloth. 

“My father was very hungry. He ate too much cactus and tuber bark. That’s what killed him. It’s like he was poisoned.” 

Chinese astronauts returned to earth Friday after completing the country’s longest-ever crewed mission, the latest landmark in Beijing’s drive to become a major space power.

The capsule carrying the three astronauts was suspended on a parachute and landed in the Gobi desert at 1:35 pm local time (05:35 GMT).

The crew of the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft were in “good health” after the 90-day mission, a record duration for China, state broadcaster CCTV reported. 

Live footage showed medical crew and support staff in a helicopter rush to a landing site in the Gobi desert. One staffer planted the Chinese national flag near the capsule. 

The taikonauts — as Chinese astronauts are known — will undergo a 14-day quarantine before they can go home “because their immune systems may have weakened after the long mission,” Huang Weifen, chief designer of China’s manned space project told CCTV.

The mission was part of China’s heavily promoted space programme, which has already seen the nation land a rover on Mars and send probes to the moon.

The launch of Beijing’s first crewed mission in nearly five years coincided with the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on July 1, and was the highlight of a massive propaganda campaign.

The crew stayed for 90 days at the Tiangong space station, conducting spacewalks and scientific experiments.

“The successful completion of the mission… paves the way for future regular missions and utlisation of the (Chinese space) station,” said Chen Lan, an independent analyst at GoTaikonauts, which specialises in China’s space programme.

“It is a very important and very much needed start for the CSS.”

Tiangong, meaning “heavenly palace”, is expected to operate for at least 10 years.

The mission is headed by Nie Haisheng, a decorated airforce pilot in the People’s Liberation Army who previously participated in two space missions.

The two other astronauts, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo, are also in the military.

– Space race –

The Chinese space agency is planning a total of 11 launches before the end of next year, including three more crewed missions that will deliver two lab modules to expand the 70-tonne station.

China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme in recent years as it tries to catch up with the United States and Russia. 

Beijing’s space ambitions have been fuelled in part by a US ban on its astronauts on the International Space Station, a collaboration between the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan.

The ISS is due for retirement after 2024, although NASA has said it could potentially remain functional beyond 2028.

“Compared to the US, China is still technically somewhat behind,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told AFP.

“The main US lead in human spaceflight is in total experience,” he said.

“For example, two spacewalks is not the same as hundreds of ISS spacewalks. Quantity makes a difference.”

SpaceX’s all-civilian Inspiration4 crew spent their first day in orbit conducting scientific research and talking to children at a pediatric cancer hospital, after blasting off on their pioneering mission from Cape Canaveral the night before.

St Jude tweeted its patients got to speak with the four American space tourists, “asking the questions we all want to know like ‘are there cows on the Moon?'”

Billionaire Jared Isaacman, who chartered the flight, is trying to raise $200 million for the research facility.

Inspiration4 is the first orbital spaceflight with only private citizens aboard.

Earlier, Elon Musk’s company tweeted that the four were “healthy” and “happy,” had completed their first round of scientific research, and enjoyed a couple of meals.

Musk himself tweeted that he had personally spoken with the crew and “all is well.”

By now, they should have also been able to gaze out from the Dragon ship’s cupola — the largest space window ever built, which has been fitted onto the vessel for the first time in place of its usual docking mechanism.

– Most humans in space –

The Inspiration4 mission also brings the total number of humans currently in space to 14 — a new record. In 2009, there were 13 people on the International Space Station (ISS).

There are currently seven people aboard the ISS, including two Russian cosmonauts, and three Chinese astronauts on spaceship Shenzhou-12, which is bound home after its crew spent 90 days at the Tiangong space station.

Isaacman, physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, geoscientist Sian Proctor and aerospace data engineer Chris Sembroski are whizzing around the planet at an altitude that at times reaches 590 kilometers (367 miles).

That is deeper in space than the ISS, which orbits at 420 kilometers (260 miles), and the furthest any humans have ventured since a 2009 maintenance mission for the Hubble telescope.

Their ship is moving at about 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) and each day they will experience about 15 sunrises and sunsets.

Their high speed means they are experiencing time slightly slower than people on the surface, because of a phenomenon called “relative velocity time dilation.”

Apart from fundraising for charity, the mission aims to study the biological effects of deep space on the astronauts’ bodies.

“Missions like Inspiration4 help advance spaceflight to enable ultimately anyone to go to orbit & beyond,” added Musk in a tweet.

The space adventure bookends a summer marked by the battle of the billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos to reach the final frontier.

But these flights only offered a few minutes of weightlessness — rather than the three full days of orbit the Inspiration4 crew will experience, before splashing down off the coast of Florida on Saturday.  

The world’s biggest trees were being wrapped in fire-proof blankets Thursday in an effort to protect them from huge blazes tearing through the drought-stricken western United States.

A grove of ancient sequoias, including the 275-foot (83-meter) General Sherman Tree — the largest in the world — were getting aluminum cladding to fend off the flames.

Firefighters were also clearing brush and pre-positioning engines among the 2,000 ancient trees in California’s Sequoia National Park, incident commanders said.

“They are taking extraordinary measures to protect these trees,” said park resource manager Christy Brigham, according to The Mercury News.

“We just really want to do everything we can to protect these 2,000- and 3,000-year-old trees.”

Millions of acres (hundreds of thousands of hectares) of California’s forests have burned in this year’s ferocious fire season.

Scientists say man-made global warming is behind the yearslong drought and rising temperatures that have left the region highly vulnerable to wildfires.

On Thursday, two fires were looming down on the park’s Giant Forest, home to five of the world’s largest trees, including the General Sherman.

Around 500 personnel were engaged in battling the Paradise Fire and the Colony Fire, which together have already consumed 9,365 acres of woodland since they erupted from lightning strikes on September 10.

The enormous trees of the Giant Forest are a huge tourist draw, with visitors travelling from all over the world to marvel at their imposing height and extraordinary girth.

While not the tallest trees — California redwoods can grow to more than 300 feet — the giant sequoias are the largest by volume.

Smaller fires generally do not harm the sequoias, which are protected by a thick bark, and actually help them to reproduce; the heat they generate opens cones to release seeds.

But the larger, hotter blazes that are laying waste to the western United States are dangerous to them because they climb higher up the trunks and into the canopy.

The world’s biggest trees were being wrapped in fire-proof blankets Thursday in an effort to protect them from huge blazes tearing through the drought-stricken western United States.

A grove of ancient sequoias, including the 275-foot (83-meter) General Sherman Tree — the largest in the world — were getting aluminum cladding to fend off the flames.

Firefighters were also clearing brush and pre-positioning engines among the 2,000 ancient trees in California’s Sequoia National Park, incident commanders said.

“They are taking extraordinary measures to protect these trees,” said park resource manager Christy Brigham, according to The Mercury News.

“We just really want to do everything we can to protect these 2,000- and 3,000-year-old trees.”

Millions of acres (hundreds of thousands of hectares) of California’s forests have burned in this year’s ferocious fire season.

Scientists say man-made global warming is behind the yearslong drought and rising temperatures that have left the region highly vulnerable to wildfires.

On Thursday, two fires were looming down on the park’s Giant Forest, home to five of the world’s largest trees, including the General Sherman.

Around 500 personnel were engaged in battling the Paradise Fire and the Colony Fire, which together have already consumed 9,365 acres of woodland since they erupted from lightning strikes on September 10.

The enormous trees of the Giant Forest are a huge tourist draw, with visitors travelling from all over the world to marvel at their imposing height and extraordinary girth.

While not the tallest trees — California redwoods can grow to more than 300 feet — the giant sequoias are the largest by volume.

Smaller fires generally do not harm the sequoias, which are protected by a thick bark, and actually help them to reproduce; the heat they generate opens cones to release seeds.

But the larger, hotter blazes that are laying waste to the western United States are dangerous to them because they climb higher up the trunks and into the canopy.

SpaceX’s all-civilian Inspiration4 crew are “healthy, happy and resting comfortably,” the company said Thursday in its first update since the pioneering mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral the night before.

The four American space tourists “traveled 5.5 times around Earth, completed their first round of scientific research, and enjoyed a couple of meals” before going to bed, Elon Musk’s company said.

Musk tweeted that he had personally spoken with the crew and “all is well.”

After waking up, they will get their first look out of the Dragon ship’s cupola — a large observation dome that has been fitted onto the vessel for the first time, in place of a docking mechanism.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman, physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, geoscientist Sian Proctor and aerospace data engineer Chris Sembroski are orbiting the globe at an altitude that at times reaches 590 kilometers (367 miles).

That is deeper in space than the International Space Station, which orbits at 420 kilometers (260 miles), and the furthest any astronauts have ventured from our planet since a 2009 maintenance mission for the Hubble telescope.

The mission aims to raise $200 million for St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and study the biological effects of deep space on the astronauts’ bodies.

Its main goal, however, is to prove that space is accessible to ordinary people as the United States and private companies like SpaceX seek to further commercialize the cosmos.

The space adventure bookends a summer marked by the battle of the billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos to reach the final frontier.

But these flights only offered a few minutes of weightlessness — rather than the three full days of orbit the Inspiration4 crew will experience, before splashing down off the coast of Florida on Saturday.