Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

Ham, a Poodle toy from Furlong, Pennsylvania, competed in the Toy Group during the 148th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at the Billy Jean King United States Tennis Center in New York. (REUTERS)

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Updated 15 May 2024

Reuters

May 15, 2024 04:40

Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

Sage, a 4-year-old black-colored female groomed in the fine, fluffy topiary style traditional for poodles, competed head to head against the winners in six other groups
The Westminster dog show bills itself as the second-oldest US sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred horse race

Updated 15 May 2024

Reuters

May 15, 2024 04:40

NEW YORK: A sprightly miniature poodle named Sage was crowned “Best in Show” on Tuesday at the 148th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, winning the grand prize in the most prestigious competition among pure-bred canines in the United States.
Sage, the finalist representing 21 breeds classified as non-sporting dogs, triumphed over more than 2,500 top-ranked dogs competing in the two-day contest, held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in the Queens borough of New York City.
Sage, a 4-year-old black-colored female groomed in the fine, fluffy topiary style traditional for poodles, competed head to head against the winners in six other groups — terriers, hounds, herding dogs, working dogs, sporting dogs and toy dogs.
She was the first female to win the top prize at Westminster since 2020, according to commentators on the Fox Sports channel, which broadcast the event live.
And she became the fourth miniature poodle to claim the top prize in the 148-year history of the contest, with the trophy previously going to her breed in 1943, 1959 and 2002, according to kennel club records.
The larger “standard” poodle breed has been declared Best in Show five times, most recently in 2020, and the smaller “toy” poodle breed has won twice.
The poodle originated as a hunting dog in Germany and is now recognized as the national dog of France.
Sage’s handler, Kaz Hosaka, cried tears of joy and carried his prized poodle in his arms around floor of the auditorium to cheers of the crowd as he celebrated what he said was his 45th year participating at the Westminster dog show and the last of his career.
The Westminster dog show bills itself as the second-oldest US sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred horse race. This year’s competition drew a field of contenders representing 200 breeds from all 50 US states and 12 other countries.
Mercedes, a female 4-year-old German shepherd, was named runner-up for the overall contest, after first winning the top prize in the herding dog group.
Along with Sage and Mercedes, the two other finalists chosen on Monday were Comet the Shih Tzu, representing the toy group, and Louis, the Afghan hound leading the hound group.
Rounding out the finalists were three group winners chosen on Tuesday — Micah the black cocker spaniel, representing sporting dogs; Monty, the giant schnauzer, leading the working dogs; and Frankie, a colored bull terrier from the terrier group.

Topics: dogs

Hong Kong launches panda sculpture tour as the city hopes the bear craze boosts tourism

Updated 02 December 2024

December 02, 2024 09:46

Hong Kong launches panda sculpture tour as the city hopes the bear craze boosts tourism

The twin cubs, whose birth in August made their mother Ying Ying the world’s oldest first-time panda mom, may meet visitors as early as February
The average lifespan for a panda in the wild is 14 to 20 years, while in captivity it is up to 30 years

Updated 02 December 2024

December 02, 2024 09:46

HONG KONG: Thousands of giant panda sculptures will greet residents and tourists starting Saturday in Hong Kong, where enthusiasm for the bears has grown since two cubs were born in a local theme park.
The 2,500 exhibits were showcased in a launch ceremony of PANDA GO! FEST HK, the city’s largest panda-themed exhibition, at Hong Kong’s airport on Monday. They will be publicly displayed at the Avenue of Stars in Tsim Sha Tsui, a popular shopping district, this weekend before setting their footprint at three other locations this month.
One designated spot is Ocean Park, home to the twin cubs, their parents and two other pandas gifted by Beijing this year. The design of six of the sculptures, made of recycled rubber barrels and resins among other materials, was inspired by these bears.
The cubs — whose birth in August made their mother Ying Ying the world’s oldest first-time panda mom — may meet visitors as early as February.
In a separate media preview event on Monday, the new pair of Beijing-gifted pandas, An An and Ke Ke, who arrived in September, appeared relaxed in their new home at Ocean Park. An An enjoyed eating bamboo in front of the cameras and Ke Ke climbed on an installation. They are set to meet the public on Sunday.
The displays reflect Hong Kong’s use of pandas to boost its economy as the Chinese financial hub works to regain its position as one of Asia’s top tourism destinations.
Pandas are considered China’s unofficial national mascot. The country’s giant panda loan program with overseas zoos has long been seen as a tool of Beijing’s soft-power diplomacy.
Hong Kong’s tourism industry representatives are upbeat about the potential impact of housing six pandas, hoping to boost visitor numbers even though caring for pandas in captivity is expensive. Officials have encouraged businesses to capitalize on the popularity of the bears to seize opportunities in what some lawmakers have dubbed the “panda economy.”
The organizer of the exhibitions also invited some renowned figures, including musician Pharrell Williams, to create special-edition panda designs. Most of these special sculptures will be auctioned online for charity and the proceeds will be donated to Ocean Park to support giant panda conversation efforts.
Ying Ying and the twin cubs’ father, Le Le, are the second pair of pandas gifted by Beijing to Hong Kong since the former British colony returned to China’s rule in 1997.
The first pair were An An and Jia Jia who arrived in 1999. Jia Jia, who died at 38 in 2016, is the world’s oldest-ever panda to have lived in captivity.
The average lifespan for a panda in the wild is 14 to 20 years, while in captivity it’s up to 30 years, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Topics: Hong Kong panda

Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond

Updated 02 December 2024

Reuters

December 02, 2024 02:40

Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond

The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in much of Latin America and the Mediterranean, while in Mexico the flat green pads that form the arms of the cactus, are used in cooking

Updated 02 December 2024

Reuters

December 02, 2024 02:40

Global warming, drought and plant disease pose a growing threat to agriculture in Italy’s arid south, but a startup founded by a former telecoms manager believes it has found a solution: Opuntia Ficus, better known as the cactus pear.
Andrea Ortenzi saw the plant’s potential 20 years ago when working for Telecom Italia in Brazil, where it is widely used as animal feed. On returning to Italy he began looking at ways to turn his intuition into a business opportunity.
He and four friends founded their company, called Wakonda, in 2021, and began buying land to plant the crop in the southern Puglia region where the traditionally dominant olive trees had been ravaged by an insect-borne disease called Xylella.

Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (REUTERS)

The damage from the plant disease has been compounded by recurring droughts and extreme weather in the last few years all over Italy’s southern mainland and islands, hitting crops from grapes to citrus fruits.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Italian agriculture hit by drought, plant disease

• Start-up Wakonda sees huge potential for cactus pears

• Cactus’ cultivation is expanding in many countries

• Versatile crop has many uses, from animal feed to fuel

Ortenzi is convinced the hardy and versatile cactus pear, otherwise called the prickly pear or, in Italy, the Indian fig, can be a highly profitable solution yielding a raft of products such as soft drinks, flour, animal feed and biofuel.
The Italian businessman is far from alone in seeing the potential of the plant, whose cultivation is expanding in hot and dry regions around the world.
“As an industry, cactus pear production is growing rather quickly, especially for fodder use and as a source of biofuel,” said Makiko Taguchi, agricultural officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization headquartered in Rome.

MULTIPLE USES
The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in much of Latin America and the Mediterranean, while in Mexico the flat green pads that form the arms of the cactus, are used in cooking.
In Tunisia, where it covers around 12 percent of cultivated land, second only to olive trees, the cactus pear is a major source of income for thousands, particularly women who harvest and sell the fruit.

A selction of products obtained from prickly pears pads are seen on dispaly at Wakonda headquarters in Rome, Italy, October 7, 2024. (REUTERS)

In Brazil, which has the world’s largest production, it is mainly cultivated in the north-east for fodder, while Peru and Chile use it to extract a red dye known as Cochineal, used in food and cosmetic production.
Sportswear group Adidas and carmaker Toyota have recently shown interest in using the cactus to produce plant-based leather sourced mainly from Mexico.
The cactus pear is not yet included in the FAO’s agricultural output statistics, but Taguchi cited the rapid expansion of CactusNet, a contact network of cactus researchers and businesses worldwide which she coordinates.
The FAO launched the group online in 2015 with 69 members. It now has 933 members in 82 countries. The plant, native to desert areas of south and north America, thrives in the increasingly arid conditions of Italy’s south, and needs ten times less water than maize, a comparable crop whose byproducts also include animal feed and methane.
So far Wakonda, an American Indian word meaning nature’s omnipresent creative force, has planted just 10 hectares of cactus with 40,000 plants per hectare, but Ortenzi plans to plant 300 hectares by the end of 2025, and he is thinking big.
Of the roughly 100,000 hectares of olive trees destroyed by Xylella in southern Puglia, only 30,000 will be replanted in the same way, he told Reuters in an interview.
“Potentially 70,000 could be planted with prickly pears,” he said.
In the long run the possibilities could be even greater, Ortenzi said, considering more than a million hectares of arable land have been abandoned in Italy in recent decades as climate change has made it more difficult to produce traditional crops.

WAKONDA’S MODEL
Wakonda’s business model discards the fruit and focuses instead on the prickly pads, which are pressed to yield a juice used for a highly nutritious, low-calorie energy drink. The dried out pads are then processed to produce a light flour for the food industry or a high-protein animal feed.
Wakonda’s circular, ecological production system also includes “biodigester” tanks in which the waste from the output cycle is transformed into methane gas used as a bio-fuel either on site or sold.
The company, which now has 37 shareholders, is in contact with mayors, firms and universities to develop its products.
Under Ortenzi’s business plan, rather than buying up land to plant the cactus, Wakonda aims to persuade farmers of its potential and then license out to them, in return for royalties, all the equipment and know-how required to exploit it.
“The land remains yours, you convert it to prickly pears and I guarantee to buy all your output for at least 15 years,” Ortenzi said.

Topics: Cactus pear

Crypto boss eats banana art he bought for $6.2 million

Updated 29 November 2024

AFP

November 29, 2024 08:16

Crypto boss eats banana art he bought for $6.2 million

Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun on Friday fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2 million on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall

Updated 29 November 2024

AFP

November 29, 2024 08:16

HONG KONG: Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun on Friday fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2 million on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall — by eating the fruit.
At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun chomped down on a banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.
“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun said after getting his first taste.
“It’s really quite good.”
Titled “Comedian,” the conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York last week, with Sun among seven bidders.
Sun said he felt “disbelief” in the first 10 seconds after he won the bid, before realizing “this could become something big.”
In the 10 seconds after that, he decided he would eat the banana.
“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” he said Friday.
The debut of the edible creation at the 2019 Art Basel show in Miami Beach sparked controversy and raised questions about whether it should be considered art — Cattelan’s stated aim.
And Sun on Friday compared conceptual art like “Comedian” to NFT art and decentralized blockchain technology.
“Most of its objects and ideas exist as (intellectual property) and on the Internet, as opposed to something physical,” he said.
Sun also this week disclosed a $30 million investment in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project backed by US president-elect Donald Trump.
The crypto businessman was last year charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission with offering and selling unregistered securities in relation to his crypto project Tron. The case is ongoing.
At a function room at the Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, two men dressed as auction house staff stood in front of a featureless wall with the yellow banana offering the only splash of color.
Sun said he only recently decided to bid for the artwork, adding he had “dumb questions” such as whether the banana had decayed and how to value the work.
The artwork owner is given a certificate of authenticity that the work was created by Cattelan as well as instructions about how to replace the fruit when it goes bad.
Event attendees on Friday each received a roll of duct tape and a banana as a souvenir.
“Everyone has a banana to eat,” he said.

Topics: Banana

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs denied bail a third time as he awaits sex trafficking trial

Updated 28 November 2024

November 28, 2024 02:20

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs denied bail a third time as he awaits sex trafficking trial

Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he coerced and abused women for years, aided by associates and employees

Updated 28 November 2024

November 28, 2024 02:20

NEW YORK: Sean “Diddy” Combs was denied bail on Wednesday as he awaits a May sex trafficking trial by a judge who cited evidence showing him to be a serious risk of witness tampering and proof that he has violated regulations in jail.
US District Judge Arun Subramanian made the decision in a written ruling following a bail hearing last week, when lawyers for the hip-hop mogul argued that a $50 million bail package they proposed would be sufficient to ensure Combs doesn’t flee and doesn’t try to intimidate prospective trial witnesses.
Two other judges previously had been persuaded by prosecutors’ arguments that the Bad Boy Records founder was a danger to the community if he is not behind bars.
Lawyers did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on the decision.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he coerced and abused women for years, aided by associates and employees. An indictment alleges that he silenced victims through blackmail and violence, including kidnapping, arson and physical beatings.
A federal appeals court judge last month denied Combs’ immediate release while a three-judge panel of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan considers his bail request.
Prosecutors have insisted that no bail conditions would be sufficient to protect the public and prevent the “I’ll Be Missing You” singer from fleeing.
They say that even in a federal lockup in Brooklyn, Combs has orchestrated social media campaigns designed to influence prospective jurors and tried to publicly leak materials he thinks can help his case. They say he also has contacted potential witnesses through third parties.
Lawyers for Combs say any alleged sexual abuse described in the indictment occurred during consensual relations between adults and that new evidence refutes allegations that Combs used his “power and prestige” to induce female victims into drugged-up, elaborately produced sexual performances with male sex workers known as “Freak Offs.”

Topics: Diddy sex trafficking

New Zealanders save more than 30 stranded whales

Updated 25 November 2024

November 25, 2024 08:57

New Zealanders save more than 30 stranded whales

New Zealand is a whale stranding hotspot and pilot whales are especially prolific stranders
New Zealand has recorded more than 5,000 whale strandings since 1840

Updated 25 November 2024

November 25, 2024 08:57

WELLINGTON: More than 30 pilot whales that stranded themselves on a beach in New Zealand were safely returned to the ocean after conservation workers and residents helped to refloat them by lifting them on sheets. Four of the pilot whales died, New Zealand’s conservation agency said.
New Zealand is a whale stranding hotspot and pilot whales are especially prolific stranders.
A team was monitoring Ruakaka Beach near the city of Whangarei in New Zealand’s north on Monday to ensure there were no signs of the whales saved Sunday stranding again, the Department of Conservation said. The agency praised as “incredible” the efforts made by hundreds of people to help save the foundering pod.
“It’s amazing to witness the genuine care and compassion people have shown toward these magnificent animals,” Joel Lauterbach, a Department of Conservation spokesperson, said in a statement. “This response demonstrates the deep connection we all share with our marine environment.”
A Maori cultural ceremony for the three adult whales and one calf that died in the stranding took place on Monday. New Zealand’s Indigenous people consider whales a taonga – a sacred treasure – of cultural significance.
New Zealand has recorded more than 5,000 whale strandings since 1840. The largest pilot whale stranding was of an estimated 1,000 whales at the Chatham Islands in 1918, according to the Department of Conservation.
It’s often not clear why strandings happen but the island nation’s geography is believed to be a factor. Both the North and South Islands feature stretches of protruding coastline with shallow, sloping beaches that can confuse species such as pilot whales – which rely on echolocation to navigate.

Topics: wildlife New Zealand

Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

After bruising safety crisis, US car watchdog shows its bite

Pet dogs and strays suffer in Asia heatwave

Hong Kong launches panda sculpture tour as the city hopes the bear craze boosts tourism

Hong Kong launches panda sculpture tour as the city hopes the bear craze boosts tourism

An An, world’s oldest male giant panda, dies at age 35 in Hong Kong

Rare panda triplets open their eyes for first time

Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond

Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond

HIGHLIGHTS

Looking sharp: Prickly pear cactus takes over Baha

Crypto boss eats banana art he bought for $6.2 million

Crypto boss eats banana art he bought for $6.2 million

Crypto boss eats banana art he bought for $6.2 million

Saudi, Japanese agencies agree to cooperation on humanitarian work

South Korea holds memorial for forced laborers in Japan after boycotting Japanese event

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs denied bail a third time as he awaits sex trafficking trial

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs denied bail a third time as he awaits sex trafficking trial

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sexually assaulted 10-year-old boy, lawsuit claims

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sex trafficking trial set for May 2025

New Zealanders save more than 30 stranded whales

New Zealanders save more than 30 stranded whales

Nearly 100 whales die after mass stranding in New Zealand

145 pilot whales die in stranding on New Zealand beach

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Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

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Hong Kong launches panda sculpture tour as the city hopes the bear craze boosts tourism

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Crypto boss eats banana art he bought for $6.2 million

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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs denied bail a third time as he awaits sex trafficking trial

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