#michiel drought

[the-cursed-wife]

Dylan's revelation ✨💫

"2:22" (2017) DIR. PAUL CURRIE

[burntthecity]

hi all, updated plotting search post coming at you. i'm attempting to get my oc muse back after a slight drought with some of my most wanted fcs, opposites and pairings atm. although you can assume i’m searching for romantic plots unless stated otherwise, i also love platonic and would be happy to do friendship plots. everything is under the cut!

fyi, i will do f/m, f/f and f/nb plots! :)

wanted fcs/people I’d like to use: shelley hennig, joseph gordon-levitt, cody christian, rachel sennott, emeraude toubia, elle fanning, bill hader, zendaya, dylan arnold, eve hewson, sophie cookson, hailee steinfeld, josephine langford, victoria pedretti, virginia gardner, elizabeth lail, brenton thwaites, paul mescal, sarah pidgeon, robbie amell, jennifer morrison, vanessa morgan, bruna marquezine, hande erçel, grace van patten, charlie heaton, gideon adlon, greta onieogou, diana silvers, sophia carson, daisy edgar-jones, devon bostick, arden cho, molly gordon, phoebe dynevor.

general opps i’d love: nicholas galitzine, peter gadiot, lola tung, lakeith stanfield, diego luna, josh hutcherson, caitlin stacey, ben feldman, ayo edibri, lizeth selene, ryan gosling, rachel sennott, gael garcia bernal, michiel huismen, molly gordon, ruby cruz, vanessa kirby, victoria pedretti, felix mallard, penn badgley, grace van dien, madison bailey, taron egerton, aaron taylor-johnson, lakeith stanfield, shelley hennig, nick robinson, ross butler, gael garcia bernal, dominique provost chalkley, david harbour.

specific pairings (bold is who i want to write as)

nicholas galtitzine x any female (will give you your most wanted fem opposite)

luke hemmings x chase sui wonders

dylan o’brien x shelley hennig

maia reficco x kit connor

taylor swift x harry styles

jessica chastain x any male

cailee spaeny x any male

cody christian x any female (might require some backstory/an interest check, my cody oc is a hot mess lmao)

joseph gordon levitt x any female (35+)

phoebe tonkin x claire holt (platonic)

madison iseman x any f/m/nb (platonic and/or romantic, m if romantic)

priscilla quintana x any female/femme nb (platonic and/or romantic)

riley keough x any f/m/nb (platonic and/or romantic)

natalia dyer x any f/m/nb (platonic and/or romantic)

other important things:

if we’ve gotten to the point of plotting on discord before and you went ghost on me, i’ll be hesitant to plot with you again. sorry, but i hate feeling like i’m wasting my time. i am in no way innocent with this either, but i generally do not let it go to that stage and ghost. communication is key.

will also be hesitant to write against you if you only write f in f/m plots or require doubling. no one wants to be used for their males. i'd be happy to give you my guys when i have the muse for them, but i also have many queer lady charas that deserve special treatment too.

i’m a pretty low maintenance partner, meaning as much as i love plotting and sending headcanons and will happily do that with you, i don’t expect to hear from you constantly throughout the day and expect the same of you with me. as long as you let me know you’re still interested, great! but please do not pester me for replies or track me if i'm online. it makes me extremely uncomfortable. respect my boundaries and i'll do the same for you.

i am a smut fan but find my muse burns out really fast if the plot is solely smut and no real storyline to go with it. if sexy stuff happens, let's explore it! i just don't want it to be the whole plot.

despite all that seeming slightly harsh ^^, i promise i'm very friendly and approachable.

if you got through all this, bless you. please send me a message if you're interested or like this and i will come to you!!

[addicted-to-michiel]

Steven Crain. No other reason needed to post this than that.

The Haunting of Hill House. Ep1. “Steven sees a ghost”

[ihaveimpeccabletaste]

Arous Holiday Village seemed like an idyllic vacation destination. In the early 1980s, hundreds of tourists flocked to its sandy white beaches and explored its underwater worlds with beautiful coral reefs. And while its location on the coast of Sudan may not have been an obvious choice for sun-seekers, given the country’s history of conflict and drought, brochures distributed across European travel agencies emphasized the regular flight routes from London, Paris and Rome to Khartoum, as well as the warm temperatures and pleasant sea breezes. But there was much more than met the eye at the popular beach resort, and that story is the inspiration for new Netflix film The Red Sea Diving Resort.

Starring Chris Evans, Michael K. Williams and Haley Bennett, The Red Sea Diving Resort is based on true events, namely the Operation Brothers mission which ran from 1979 to 1984 and saved the lives of thousands of Ethiopian Jews. In reality, and as depicted in the film, an abandoned hotel did serve as the perfect cover for a risky operation smuggling Ethiopian Jewish refugees through the hotel on the East African coast, sending them onwards by boat to safety and new lives in Israel. Official information related to the mission was declassified only in recent years.

Some critics have called out The Red Sea Diving Resort for putting forth a “white-savior” narrative, privileging the roles of the Israeli Mossad agents led by Evans’ character Ari Levinson. Director Gideon Raff said in a statement that the Ethiopian community “were true partners in this operation and they are the real heroes of this story,” noting that it was important to him to cast actors from the Ethiopian community in the film. The movie’s release also comes at a tense moment in Israel, where large-scale protests flared up in early July after the shooting of 18-year-old Solomon Tekah, marking the 11th Ethiopian Israeli killed by police in the past 20 years. Tekah’s murder sharpened focus on the grievances of Israel’s 150,000-strong Ethiopian community, members of which have voiced their frustrations against racism and discrimination in the country since the first major waves of immigration that started with these operations in 1980s.

Here’s a closer look back at the history behind the true events that inspired The Red Sea Diving Resort:

Why were Ethiopian Jews fleeing their home country?

The history of Ethiopian Jews is a long and complex one, with many academics unsure of exactly when and how a Jewish population came to be in Ethiopia. While some of their customs are distinct from Hebrew traditions, the community, historically known as Beta Israel, has become a largely accepted part of mainstream Judaism. “It’s a bit shrouded in mystery, but there are reports that a huge community lived in Ethiopia for ages, more than 1,500 years. Some people even speak about millennia,” says Jon Abbink, a professor of governance and politics in Africa, specializing in Ethiopia, at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a combination of push factors in Ethiopia led to a big exodus of refugees from the Beta Israel community, as depicted in The Red Sea Diving Resort. The Ethiopian revolution in 1974 heightened underlying political tensions in the country, with opponents of the military regime led by Mengistu Haile Mariam facing the threat of arrest or execution. There were also environmental and economic factors, with droughts in 1973 and 1974, and again in the early 1980s, leading to widespread famine and one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 20th century.

Amid the country’s descent into civil war beginning 1974, Ethiopian Jews became more prominent as political revolutionaries, active in rebel struggles against the military regime. Infighting between the differing rebel groups, combined with the instability in the country, led to more and more Beta Israel refugees fleeing Ethiopia via Sudan at the beginning of 1978, according to Abbink. “We saw this conjuncture of political and ecological and economic issues which urged the Beta Israel to leave the country, led by community activists,” he says. As depicted in the beginning of the film, the journey across the deserts of the Horn of Africa to reach refugee camps in Sudan was often dangerous, but a risk judged worth taking by Ethiopian Jews who feared for their lives. One estimate suggests that around 4,000 of the 20,000 Beta Israel people who made the journey from northern Ethiopia to Sudan died en route.

Alessandro Nivola, Chris Evans, Haley Bennett and Michiel Huisman in 'The Red Sea Diving Resort' Marcos Cruz—Netflix / Marcos Cruz

Why were Israeli agents involved in refugee rescue operations?

In The Red Sea Diving Resort, Evans’ character Ari Levinson hatches a bold plan: to renovate an abandoned Italian hotel on the coast of Sudan, eight hours’ drive from the capital of Khartoum, and use it as a cover to smuggle Ethiopian Jews from refugee camps to Israel via boat. Israeli officers initially react with skepticism at the proposal, but decide to entrust Levinson with planning the operation and recruiting fellow Mossad agents from around the world to help him.

While this scene appears to have added a touch of dramatic flair, Mossad agents certainly were instrumental in scouting out possible locations that could act as a cover to transport the refugees to safety, as well as eventually running the real-life resort. But the origins of Operation Brothers were also due in large part to the efforts of activists from the Ethiopian Jewish community. “Initially Israeli authorities were contacted by Ethiopian Beta Israel activists asking if they could help. There definitely was a demand,” says Abbink. One of these activists was Farede Yazazao Aklum, who was the inspiration for Williams’ character. After fleeing his home in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, and walking the grueling 300 miles to Khartoum, Sudan, Aklum wrote a letter that triggered Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to task Mossad agents with the rescue of the Beta Israel.

Earlier in the 1970s, smaller numbers of Ethiopian Jews were transported to safety by plane from Khartoum and welcomed in Israel. Larger Mossad-led operations including Operation Brothers, and the later Operation Moses (1984-1985) and Operation Solomon (1991), were responsible for the arrival of an estimated 90,000 members of the community in Israel by the end of the 1990s. “In the case of the Beta Israel, this was the only example where another country was willing and able to help the people, and adopt the people,” says Abbink. “Many other refugees remained, and still are in Sudan, because no country is really ready to take them in. But the Israeli government made a commitment to take their people in.”

Did an escape mission really happen at a hotel in Sudan?

In 1981, Mossad agents scouted the Sudanese coastline and found 15 beachside villas that had been abandoned a decade earlier. Nestled on the shorelines of the Red Sea and boasting picturesque coral reefs, the resort provided a front for agents to covertly transport Beta Israel refugees to boats that would carry them to Israel. As depicted in the film, the Sudanese International Tourist Corporation did actually believe it was renting the resort out to hotel managers and diving enthusiasts — all of whom were in fact undercover Israeli operatives. Real, unsuspecting tourists, mainly from Europe, came to stay at the resort, attracted by brochures that touted “breathtaking views of the heavens, aflame with millions of stars” and “an abundance of exotic fish” in “exceptionally clear waters.”

“This operation was so fulfilling, because you were saving hundreds of people from a very bad fate,” said Yola Reitman in a video interview for a behind-the-scenes look at the film. Reitman was an Israeli agent responsible for managing the hotel, a role reflected by Haley Bennett’s character in the film. At the time, Abbink was studying in Israel, and knew of the operation that was happening at the Arous Holiday Village. “Of course, I kept my mouth shut so as not to endanger anything. It was an extremely delicate mission,” he recalls.

Chris Evans and Haley Bennett in 'The Red Sea Diving Resort' Marcos Cruz—Netflix / Marcos Cruz

Was the mission successful?

As depicted in the film, the mission spanned years and resulted in the relocation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Jerusalem, while agents kept up appearances maintaining and managing the hotel. According to Abbink, around 8,000 Beta Israel individuals escaped to Israel via Sudan through the resort, which made it the largest-scale operation of its time.

As a boy, Daniel Sahalo and his family fled from Ethiopia via Sudan to Israel as part of Operation Moses, which airlifted over 7,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984-1985. “There was just a rumor that we needed to get to Sudan and from there we might be able to get help,” he said in a video interview. Sahalo worked as an historical consultant on The Red Sea Diving Resort, saying that the film was important to tell to future generations because “these people risked their lives every day for almost three years.”

“What I hope the audience will think about when they see the film is that there are about 65 million refugees in the world today,” said Raff in a statement. “We seem to be closing the doors in their faces and many of them are losing their lives on their way to a better future. Compassion would be the biggest thing that I hope people will take away.”

Correction, August 1

The original version of this story misstated The Red Sea Diving Resort’sconnection to Mossad Exodus: The Daring Undercover Rescue of the Lost Jewish Tribe, by Gad Shimron. The film is not associated with the book.

[kathleenseiber]

Serengeti wildlife feel the squeeze of human activity

Increased human activity around one of Africa’s most iconic ecosystems is damaging habitat and disrupting the migration routes of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle, a new study warns.

The Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is one of the largest and most protected ecosystems on Earth, spanning 40,000 square kilometers and taking in the Serengeti National Park and Maasai Mara National Reserve in East Africa.

Every year a million wildebeest, half a million gazelle, and 200,000 zebra make the perilous trek from the Serengeti park in Tanzania to the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya in search for water and grazing land.

Increased human activities around the boundaries of the Serengeti National Park and Maasai Mara National Reserve in East Africa have damaged habitat and constrained the area available for the migration of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelles. (Credit: Anna Estes/Penn State)

Now, an international team of scientists warn that increased human activity along the boundaries is having a detrimental impact on plants, animals, and soils.

“There is an urgent need to rethink how we manage the boundaries of protected areas to be able to conserve biodiversity,” says lead author Michiel Veldhuis, from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “The future of the world’s most iconic protected area and their associated human population may depend on it.”

Less room to move

For the study, which appears in Science, researchers looked at 40 years of data, and discovered that some boundary areas have seen a 400 percent increase in human population over the past decade, while larger wildlife species populations in key areas (the Kenyan side) fell more than 75 percent.

The study reveals how population growth and an influx of livestock in the buffer zones of the parks has squeezed the area available for migration of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelles, causing them to spend more time grazing less nutritious grasses than they did in the past.

This has reduced the frequency of natural fires, which in turn changes the vegetation, and alters grazing opportunities for other wildlife in the core areas.

“We have long worried about the compression of protected areas due to agricultural conversion and how it affects both wildlife in protected areas and livestock in pastoral lands,” says Anna Estes, assistant research professor in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State and an author of the paper.

“It’s now clear that the intensification of agriculture and livestock-keeping around the borders is impacting ecosystem function even well within the protected area. This highlights the need to keep the rangelands outside protected areas productive and functioning, both for the pastoral livelihoods they support, and for the conservation of Tanzania’s flagship ecosystems and the services they provide,” she says.

The impacts also cascade down the food chain, favoring less palatable herbs and altering the beneficial interactions between plants and microorganisms that allow the ecosystem to capture and utilize essential nutrients.

A warning about the future

The effects could potentially make the ecosystem less resilient to future shocks such as drought or further climate change, the scientists warn.

“We’ve been aware of the threats to migratory wildlife populations in smaller protected areas where they depend on access to increasingly human-dominated landscapes, but the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is one of our largest and best protected ecosystems, and even it is threatened by human impacts around its borders,” Estes says.

“This highlights the need to consider protected areas as integrated components in larger, shared landscapes, particularly in the face of a changing climate.”

Even reasonably well-protected areas like the Serengeti and Mara may need alternative strategies to sustain the coexistence and livelihood of local people and wildlife in the landscapes surrounding protected areas. The current strategy of increasingly hard boundaries may risk both people and wildlife.

“We should rethink our protected area strategy, making sure that conservation efforts do not stop at protected area boundaries,” says coauthor Simon Mduma, director of the Tanzanian government’s Wildlife Research Institute.

“These results come at the right time, as the Tanzanian government is now taking important steps to address these protected areas boundary issues on a national level.”

Source: Penn State

The post Serengeti wildlife feel the squeeze of human activity appeared first on Futurity.

Serengeti wildlife feel the squeeze of human activity published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[awesomeblockchain]

The concept of microinsurance is getting a shot in the arm from new technologies, not least among them blockchain.

A term coined at the turn of the millennium, "microinsurance" is often defined as coverage for people on very low incomes. However, the concept has run up against many of the problems faced by microfinance generally. In theory, it's a great idea, but the practicalities of distribution and operational costs make it unsustainable in many cases.

The most commonly cited use case is coverage to protect small farmers in developing countries from abject weather conditions. From an insurer's perspective, this can involve writing policies or overseeing a claims-handling process for a single-hectare farm (not much bigger than a soccer field) in the African bush. The associated costs far outweigh the meager premium these types of customers can afford.

Or, to put it in layman's terms, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, from the insurer's point of view.

However, a perfect storm of new tech including blockchain, the internet of things and big data analytics is changing the outlook for microinsurance. Indeed, many experts are now saying these technologies, put together, could upend the whole value chain.

While specialist groups like Microinsurance Network have been touting blockchain's potential for a couple years, there is now a steady groundswell of startups such as Etherisc and InsurePal looking at combining microinsurance and blockchain.

The potential is also reaching beyond the world of insurtech, with even large insurance companies like Zurich and Axa experimenting with blockchain for this type of coverage.

To push things forward, Etherisc, an insurtech company that builds products on the ethereum blockchain, recently hired an expert on developing-world microinsurance, Michiel Berende, as its inclusive insurance lead.

Berende, who previously lived in India under a grant program to study how coverage can be cheaply deployed, told CoinDesk:

"Today, it is non-insurers that are managing to make inclusive insurance possible, to make it profitable, and to make it interesting."

Cutting costs

Just last week, Etherisc illustrated how blockchain could help bring efficiencies and lower costs of this type of insurance by introducing weather damage coverage for hurricane-battered Puerto Rico.

In this example, Etherisc's platform locks up premiums in smart contracts on the public ethereum blockchain. When certain pre-set parameters are met (in this case, a weather sensor picking up high-speed winds), payouts are triggered instantly.

Such quick payment would represent an improvement on the status quo - many of the Puerto Ricans who could afford insurance are still waiting for their claims for damage caused by Hurricane Maria to be processed. Known as parametric insurance, this type of coverage does away with the whole rigmarole of assessing a claim - the insurer simply agrees to make a payment if a triggering event occurs.

And in this specific iteration using a blockchain, other costs are mitigated as well - because, unlike large insurers with thousands of employees, smart contracts don't need to be paid or housed in skyscrapers, as Etherisc co-founder and CEO Stephan Karpischek likes to point out.

Similarly, Zurich Insurance Group recently revealed a prototype of microinsurance crop insurance on ethereum.

Designed by Martin Baier, Zurich's program manager for business innovation and development at Zurich, the prototype used an external weather data source API as the oracle to trigger the automatic payout in case of drought or flooding.

The project earned Zurich the distinction of being the only incumbent from its industry to make it to the finals of an insurtech competition held in Zug, Switzerland (nicknamed "crypto valley" for its concentration of blockchain startups).

Another insurance giant, AXA, which recently launched a blockchain-based parametric flight delay product (if the plane is two hours late, the customer gets an automatic payout), is looking at similar applications for rural microinsurance.

Again, the key is having an external data source that would ping the blockchain in the event of payout-triggering events.

"To assess the [crop] yield on a one-hectare farm would be expensive. To significantly reduce costs, you have to use remote-sensing technologies, for example from satellites, to monitor vegetation developments," said Tanguy Touffut, CEO of AXA Global Parametrics.

Inclusive insurance

Apart from streamlining processes and cutting costs, what really gets some people excited about blockchain in microinsurance is its potential to foster peer-to-peer mutuality - simply put, allowing individuals to take on risks that are currently the preserve of large insurance firms.

What if any group of people could create their own pooling system on the spot? These could be instant mini-insurers or mini-mutuals, suggested Michael Mainelli, co-founder of fintech think tank Z/Yen.

"Over time, this could lead to new players entering the market and disintermediation of traditional insurance through the automation of certain insurance products, probably around well-known and common risks," said Mainelli.

Yet Etherisc's Berende sees a broad spectrum of new models. For example, a risk pool to protect small farmers could also involve big players further up the supply chain, like Starbucks or Nestle.

Bringing this type of collaborative commerce to value chains would be a big deal. The world's population is expected to hit nine billion people in the next 10 or 20 years (some 300,000 extra mouths to feed every day).

Around half a billion small-scale farmers produce crops to meet these needs. Yet they are at the mercy of the palpable effects of global warming which are making weather conditions more severe around the planet.

Trying to close a big deal for a pilot scheme in this area, Berende said he is in discussions about blockchains, smart contracts and risk pools with several conglomerates and a large global charity, none of whom he could name.

These risk pools, which could be part public and part privately-owned, might also include farm-input suppliers, farmers' co-operatives, donor organizations and government bodies.

Putting this on a blockchain, so to speak, could help ensure that aid money would only be paid out given specific conditions, as per the smart contracts. A lot of money is spent via initiatives to help farmers cope with climate change, but unfortunately, much of it is lost before reaching its intended location.

However, Berende told CoinDesk:

"Blockchain allows us to program money. So if you put money in a risk pool you could be guaranteed the money would only be spent at the correct location."

African farm image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

https://ift.tt/2HWVTPV

[addicted-to-michiel]

I love a man in uniform…

Credit to the owner- not all gifs are mine.

[the-cursed-wife]

🎶 Happy Birthday 🎶 Michiel! 🤩

[the-cursed-wife]

Daniel Murphy. That is all.

[the-cursed-wife]

Who else can use one of these?

[the-cursed-wife]

Welcome to Wet Wednesday 😅

[the-cursed-wife]

From this day forward Sep. 10 shall be known as the day a collective sigh of disappointment from Michiel Huisman fans was heard around the world 😓