Avocados were a big driver of crime in New Zealand pre-COVID. So high-value that orchards were being raided and stripped overnight. I can fully imagine violence around this.
It's used quite widely in bioinformatics, at least in Australia. Over the last ten years I've written numerous web apps for scientists to provide user-friendly interfaces to their fortran command-line programs.
In Australia a major tomato producer built their new greenhouse facility in the high-altitude (1km) New England region because it's cheaper to heat the greenhouses in the cold winter months than to cool them in the hot summer months in low-altitude high-temperature areas. It might be with global warming the economics of Canadian tomatoes get even better.
I have friends who believe that dog saliva is very healthy and helps your immune system, and they encourage dogs to lick their faces. Given what I''ve seen my dog eating and licking I do my very best to avoid her spittle.
I'm very sorry for your loss. The audience for my gardening reminders email subscription includes a lot of older people. I have received a number of requests to end subscriptions on the death of a spouse. I handle as I hope they wish - immediately and with a brief note of acknowledgement.
Related to this the sales of my gardening app in March were about 100% higher than usual. That's coming off a low base (people don't like paying for apps) but it's a big change. Most of that was in Australia where it's coming into winter so it's not the usual vegetable gardening time. You can't buy vegetable seedlings anywhere at present as they're sold out immediately.
I'm not sure this will happen as the state borders are being closed and governments are strongly advising people to stay put. Also the federal government is looking at an 80% of wage scheme similar to the UK which must reduce the pressure to move just to cover living expenses.
The commonly reported figure in Australia is that we produce three times as much food as we consume [1], so the panic buying is completely unwarrented.
That's very location specific. Heat waves kill more people in Australia than any other natural disaster and they're worsening and becoming more frequent.
I read this as 'pita' as in 'pita bread'. A clever reference to lunch time if that was the intention? Culturally different too as we don't often eat pita for lunch here, but I imagine it's common elsewhere.
One of the issues is that the 'window' for fuel load management/back burning is shrinking because the bush fire season is starting earlier. We had out of control fires from September, which is unheard of, and concerns that they were started by back burning operations.
In many regions, like my local mid-north coast area, what has burnt is rainforest which doesn't usually burn but has been impacted by several years of drought. It is quite likely these forests won't recover as dense rainforest and will transition to more sparse eucalyptus which is a net loss in carbon storage as well as a tragic ecosystem loss.
A lot of the commentary here is attacking the specifics of the bill as unrealistic posturing. This ignores what I think is the main point - that the NZ government has reached consensus acknowledging that climate change is an existential risk and they need to respond at a goverment level. The details of how they act will almost certainly be changed but it's a start. It also assists in putting pressure on Australia. This is important because Australia has a climate-change denial government and powerful coal mining lobbies, and with only 25M people generates more CO2 pollution than the UK, France, or South Korea [1][2].
Ethical investment funds do exist, and these explicitly don't invest in fossil fuel industries. There are also ethical superannuation funds (in the Australian context). Individuals can choose a direction for their investment.