UK mulls crackdown on smoking
London, Aug 29: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed on Thursday that his government is looking at introducing tougher anti-smoking measures, which could potentially see a ban on smoking in outdoor spaces, including at pubs and restaurants.
His confirmation came after a report in the Sun newspaper that the government was mulling a ban in pub gardens and outdoor restaurants, as well as outside facilities such as hospitals, universities and sports grounds.
Smoking in the UK has been banned inside pubs, restaurants and most workplaces since 2007. Still, smoking-related illnesses remain a drain on the National Health Service, costing it over 2.5 billion pounds a year in England alone, according to figures from the NHS. “My starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking,” Starmer said in Paris while visiting French President Emmanuel Macron.
“So, yes, we are going to take decisions in this space, more details will be revealed, but this is a preventable series of deaths and we’ve got to take action to reduce the burden on the NHS and the taxpayer.” Starmer’s Labour government, which was elected in July, has already said it will reintroduce the former Conservative administration’s legislation to outlaw the sale of tobacco to anyone born on or after January 2009. Under that plan, which didn’t become law because the election was called early, the legal age that people in England can buy cigarettes will be raised by one year, every year until it is eventually illegal for the whole population.
The number of people who smoke in the UK has declined by two-thirds since the 1970s, but some 6.4 million people in the country – or about 13 per cent of the population – still smoke, according to official figures. (AP)
Sinkhole swallows SUV in SKorea
Seoul, Aug 29: A sinkhole suddenly opened and swallowed an SUV in South Korea’s capital on Thursday, injuring the two occupants, emergency workers said.
Photos from the scene showed a white sport utility vehicle engulfed in the 2½-metre-deep hole that appeared on a street in the central part of Seoul.
Emergency workers rescued the vehicle’s 82-year-old male driver and a 76-year-old female passenger. No one else was hurt in the incident, which occurred at around 11:20 am (0220 GMT), according to Seoul’s Seodaemun district fire station.
The conditions of the injured victims weren’t immediately known. Traffic in the Seondaemun area continued to be restricted as of Thursday evening as workers and officials repaired the damaged road and investigated the cause of the sinkhole.(AP)
Over 100 tons of dead fish piles up at Greek port
Volos, Aug 29: More than 100 tons of dead fish had been collected in and around the port of Volos, in central Greece, following a mass die-off linked to extreme climate fluctuations, authorities said on Thursday. The dead freshwater fish filled the bay, 320 kilometers (200 miles) north of Athens, and nearby rivers after water levels were swollen by floods last year, followed by months of severe drought. The die-off has hit local businesses along the seafront with commercial activity reduced by 80 per cent in the past three days, according to Volos’s Chamber of Commerce. Fishing trawlers have been chartered by the regional authorities, along with earthmovers, to scoop the dead fish out of the sea and load them onto trucks bound for an incinerator. The fish came from Lake Karla in central Greece, a body of water drained in the early 1960s and restored in 2018 to combat the effects of drought. (AP)
Rare orca pod spotted off coast
Sydney, Aug 29: A pod of orcas was spotted on Thursday in waters off the coast of Sydney for the first time in six years. The killer whales were seen chasing a group of humpback whales off the coast of Curl Curl Beach in Sydney who were on a tour on a Whale Watching Sydney boat. “There was a frenzy of activity and the orcas buzzed past the boat in formation, while chasing the humpbacks,” Whale Watching Sydney said in a post on social media. “The humpbacks were closing in together and we assume they may have been protecting a calf, but it’s hard to tell with such a flurry of excitement,” it said. The tour operator said orcas’ venturing as far north as Sydney is incredibly rare and that it was the first sighting of the apex predator species in Sydney waters since 2018, Xinhua news agency reported. Vanessa Pirotta, a whale expert from Macquarie University, told Nine Entertainment newspapers that it is common for orcas to hunt juvenile humpback whales off Australia’s west coast in the Indian Ocean but that it is rarely seen in east coast Pacific Ocean waters. (IANS)
US to kill nearly half mn invasive barred owls amid controversy
Los Angeles, Aug 29: The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a controversial strategy to kill nearly half a million invasive barred owls in the Pacific Northwest to prevent at-risk native spotted owls from extinction.
The management strategy is the first comprehensive tool developed to address the significant threat posed by non-native and invasive barred owls to the survival of northern and California spotted owls in Washington, Oregon, and California, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said on Wednesday.
The principal federal agency dedicated to wildlife conservation in the United States said in a press release that the strategy calls for a step-by-step process, relying on willing land managers and landowners’ management of barred owls. The agency estimated that a maximum of about 4,50,000 invasive barred owls, or about 15,000 per year, could be removed over 30 years. Barred owls are native to eastern North America but moved westward in the 20th century and now surpass spotted owls in numbers across most of Washington, Oregon, and California. Northern spotted owl populations have been rapidly declining due to competition from invasive barred owls and habitat loss and are listed as a threatened species, according to the press release, adding that California spotted owls face a similar risk. (AP)