Your Tuesday Briefing: Russia escalates attacks on civilians

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We’re masking civilians in Ukraine caught in escalating assaults and new analysis warning of a much less resilient Amazon rainforest.

Russian forces are stepping up indiscriminate assaults on civilian targets and laying siege to cities throughout Ukraine. Fears are rising over the destiny of hundreds of Ukrainians trapped in cities with out warmth and sufficient meals provides.

As of Monday, 202 faculties, 34 hospitals and greater than 1,500 residential buildings have been destroyed because the struggle started, whereas practically 1,000 cities and villages are fully disadvantaged of electrical energy, water and warmth, in line with an adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ukraine dismissed a Kremlin proposal to evacuate a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals to Russia and its ally Belarus. Russian forces have saved up shelling of so-called evacuation corridors, the place civilians try to flee. Observe our stay updates.

At daybreak, Russian forces unleashed a ferocious artillery assault on the southern metropolis of Mykolaiv, hitting residential neighborhoods with rockets. By night, the weapons had died down, and Ukrainian officers declared that their forces had as soon as once more repelled the Russian onslaught.

Only a month in the past, China’s chief, Xi Jinping, and Putin, met in Beijing and declared that their international locations’ friendship had “no limits.” Lower than three weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine within the form of unilateral army intervention that China has lengthy denounced.

Now Xi is in a tricky spot as he seeks a groundbreaking third time period as get together chief. After first sounding sympathetic to Moscow’s safety calls for, China has sought to melt its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties and calling for an finish to the struggle.

A Western intelligence report concluded that Chinese language officers informed the Russians to not invade in the course of the Olympics, although it’s unclear if Putin had straight informed Xi his plans. Both approach, Xi’s heat embrace of Putin could have emboldened Putin to gamble on going to struggle in Ukraine.

Different worldwide fallout: Bari, Italy, house to relics commemorated by Orthodox Christians all through the previous Soviet bloc, faces a spillover of tensions from Russia’s invasion.


The Amazon is approaching a crucial threshold past which a lot of it is going to be changed by grassland, with huge penalties for international local weather change, scientists reported.

A brand new research printed within the journal Nature Local weather Change discovered that greater than three-quarters of the untouched rainforest misplaced resiliency since 2000, and that the loss was biggest in areas that have been drier or nearer to human actions like logging. The researchers who led the research mentioned their findings confirmed that efforts to cease deforestation would have an effect on the resiliency of the Amazon as an entire.

About 17 p.c of the Amazon has been deforested over the previous half-century. If the development continues, shedding the rainforest may add as much as 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the ambiance, the equal to a number of years of world emissions. Savannas would additionally take up far much less carbon than the massive, broad-leafed timber they changed.

Quotable: Now we have to get to zero deforestation, zero forest degradation,” Carlos Nobre, a senior scientist on the Nationwide Institute of Amazonian Analysis, mentioned. “We nonetheless have an opportunity to avoid wasting the forest.”

Different local weather information: The Biden administration proposed strict new limits on air pollution from buses, supply vans and different heavy vans.

Burundian drumming is a worldwide phenomenon, featured in blockbuster motion pictures and best-selling albums. However at house, the authorities have restricted it to official features — and barred ladies from performing.

If you’re lactose-intolerant, there are a lot of extra choices for you now. Grocery shops carry milk produced from soy, almonds, coconuts, oats and even potatoes, and the development isn’t slowing down, Victoria Petersen writes in The New York Occasions.

Plant milks have existed for a very long time. Coconut milk has been used for hundreds of years in South Asia, South America and the Caribbean, and almond milk has been a staple ingredient in North Africa, Europe and the Center East for practically 1,000 years. However the rising reputation of vegetarian and vegan diets has turned them into an enormous enterprise: In 2020, plant-based milks accounted for 15 p.c of all retail milk gross sales.

“Dwelling in a metropolitan hub like London, I’ve no must be ingesting cow, goat or every other animal’s milk,” Sarah Bentley, who runs a plant-based-cooking college, mentioned. Her favorites: hemp milk, for its low environmental influence, and oat milk that’s enriched with B and D nutritional vitamins for her son.

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