Good news stories you may have missed

Future Crunch has 99 good news stories from 2019, you have probably never seen. Here’s a few:

• New surveys revealed that the population of humpback whales in the South Atlantic region now number 24,900 — almost 93% of their population size before they were hunted to the brink of extinction
• In Kenya, poaching rates have dropped by 85% for rhinos and 78% for elephants in the last five years
• Algeria and Argentina officially eliminated malaria this year
• The Global Burden of Disease Report said that between 1990 and 2017, the number of kids and teenagers dying around the world decreased by more than half, from 13.77 million to 6.64 million
• Remember bird flu, the disease that was going to be the next global pandemic? There hasn’t been a single H5N1 human infection since February 2017
• In the biggest breakthrough for cystic fibrosis in decades, a new drug that targets the genetic roots of the disease was approved by the FDA.
• Malawi eliminated the world’s most common infectious eye disease, trachoma, the second African country to do so after Ghana. In 2014 more than eight million people were at risk. Today, that number is zero.
• A new Ebola vaccine was cleared for distribution in 2019, and is working miracles, reducing mortality rates from 70% to as low as 6%.
• New research showed that the proportion of people in extreme poverty around the world fell from 36% in 1990 to 8.6% in 2018.
• The biggest global story you didn’t hear about this year was the successful conclusion of India’s extraordinary sanitation drive. In the last five years, 90 million toilets have been built, 93% of households now have access, and 500 million people have stopped defecating in the open.

… Continue Reading

An earlier Star deliverer 

We received an interesting letter from Val Johns’ brother in law Lloyd who lives in Australia. He wrote; 

“In the 1950s I delivered Charlie Michelle’s Martinborough Star to around 40 or so residents each Wednesday after school for the princely sum of 2/6d. 

( 2020 = $8.72). On every Wednesday, the Star went over the front gate or was stuffed into the letter box if accessible without stopping, but on the last delivery before Christmas, every paper was hand delivered to Charlie’s readers – it was well worth the effort to get off the bike and knock on the back door !

I did this for several years until my bicycle fell apart and Lamb’s garage had great difficulty getting spare parts for it.” … Continue Reading

Book review

Agent running in the field

John Le Carre has been writing spy tales for fifty years during which time he has turned out twenty five of these novels. Some of these such as  Smiley’s people, The little drummer girl and The night manager have been made into successful films.

It would be of no surprise if having written so many novels of the genre that they had become a bit formularised, however having read quite a few of them I find that this is not the case. Agent running in the field is another of Le Carre’s well thought out and told tales.

The lead character has had a successful career as an agent who is now back in England and given been given a nice quiet position as a manager of a small London station of no great importance to work out the remaining years to eventual retirement.  The station is a substation of the London Russian station and subservient to it. It is considered of no account in the scheme of things. … Continue Reading

Cooking corner

Watermelon bites

Ingredients 

2 cups watermelon cubes,

 250gr cold smoked salmon, sliced

150gr Camembert cheese – or cheese of your choice

½ cup fresh mint leaves 

toothpicks 

Method … Continue Reading