Tag Archives: Feeds

US

Buffalo Couple Feeds 130 Strangers During Blizzard on Christmas

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  • A Buffalo couple opened up the church where they lived to feed and offer refuge to dozens of strangers.
  • Al and Vivien Robinson initially planned to spend Christmas with their children.
  • Instead, the couple fed some 130 people and set up beds and mattresses to shelter locals.

A couple in Buffalo is being hailed as heroes for feeding more than 100 people during the blizzard that has left at least 39 dead.

Al Robinson is a pastor with the Spirit Of Truth Urban Ministry in the Buffalo neighborhood of Lovejoy. He and his wife Vivien live on the church campus.

Robinson told TODAY that he and Vivien had initially planned to spend Christmas weekend with their nine children, who were visiting from out of town. They stocked up on food for their family, but upon learning of trapped residents in their neighborhood, the couple decided to switch plans.

“We had people that were freezing to death,” Robinson said.

The couple used their Facebook profiles and groups like Buffalo Blizzard Response to encourage locals to take shelter at their church.

“Those that are stranded and stuck in Lovejoy, we are offering shelter here at the church. We do not want anybody to freeze,” Robinson wrote on his Facebook profile, along with the church’s address and phone number.

With the two weeks stock of food they had, they were able to feed around 130 people over the weekend.

“People were elderly. We had a 92-year-old that needed oxygen. We had 9-month-olds that needed formula. We had so many things going on and every one of those needs were met,” Robinson told TODAY.

 

“I just do not want anyone going hungry. God is shedding His grace on my neighbors,” Robinson wrote on a Facebook post on December 29.

 

In a Facebook video posted on December 27, Robinson said he delivered food and baby formula to people who couldn’t make it to the church because of the cold weather. The couple also set up beds and mattresses in the church center to shelter locals, per TODAY.

Tametha Ann Brookins, one of the locals the couple helped, expressed gratitude for donating food to her family. 

“I’m in tears. I’ve been feeling forsaken and lost hope in the people around me,” Brookins wrote on the Buffalo Blizzard Response page on December 28. “The bags of food you dropped off today have relieved this fear that I wasn’t going to be able to feed myself or kids and I’m breathing easier today.”

Robinson and Brookins did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.

Robinson and Vivien aren’t the only good Samaritans who helped their community during the blizzard in Buffalo.

Sha’Kyra Aughtry saved a disabled man’s life when she heard him screaming for help outside her home. She and her boyfriend spent two days caring for the man — who has been identified as Joe White — until he was finally sent to the hospital.

And an unidentified Buffalo resident, who has been dubbed “Jay” by Cheektowaga police, rescued strangers who were trapped in cars.

“He left a note apologizing for the damage & use of the snow blower he used to make a path to the school,” Cheektowaga police wrote on Twitter on 30 December. “We want to thank “Jay” for his heroic actions that saved people’s lives.”



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Science

‘Extraordinary Discovery’: Invasive Spider Captures and Feeds on Bats

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Michel Dugon, head of the Venom Systems Lab at National University of Ireland, shows off a false widow spider.


NUI Galway

Noble false widow spiders, venomous arachnids that resemble black widows, aren’t native to the UK. They hitched a ride from Madiera and the Canary Islands in the 1800s, but have made themselves at home in their new region. At least one false widow in England has chosen an unusual cuisine item: bats.

The National University of Ireland Galway described an “extraordinary discovery” made by wildlife artist Ben Waddams at his home in England. A spider living near Waddams’ attic fed off a small, young bat caught in its web. 

“It is the first time a member of this family of spiders, called Theridiidae, has been recorded preying on a bat anywhere in the world, or any vertebrate in Britain,” the university said in a statement on Tuesday.

The ambitious spider snacked on the pup, but also captured a second, larger bat that was rescued and released. Pipistrelle bats — dainty mammals that only get to about to 2 inches (5 centimeters) in length — are a protected species in the UK. Bat population declines have been traced to modern agricultural practices and loss of habitat (PDF link).

A bat entangled in a noble false widow spider’s web is on the left. The noble false widow that fed on a bat is on the right.


Ben Waddams

NUI Galway zoologist Michel Dugon is co-author of a study on the spider’s bat-snack published in the journal Ecosphere in late February with a fitting superhero-inspired title: “Webslinger vs. Dark Knight: First record of a false widow spider Steatoda nobilis preying on a pipistrelle bat in Britain.” The study addresses the impact the invasive spiders could have on native species. 

“We have been working on the noble false widow for the past five years, and have learnt a great deal about this species – yet, we are still surprised by its ability to adapt to new environments and make the most of the resources available,” said Dugon. “It is a truly remarkable species.”

NUI Galway released a video with behind-the-scenes details on the spider and how it managed to capture and consume a bat.

While noble false widow spiders are mainly a threat to their prey, NUI Galway researchers found the spider’s bite can require hospitalization for humans in some severe cases.

The research team behind the spider study is encouraging the UK public to contact them with sightings of the noble false widow. More reports could help scientists better understand the spider’s behavior and how it affects native species. 

The false widow’s bat-eating event joins a gruesome list of scientifically fascinating arachnid meals. Researchers in 2021 published a study cataloging reports of spiders eating snakes all over the globe. Spiders might be small, but they’re mighty.

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World

Urban garden in Rio feeds hundreds of families in former ‘crackland’

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 5 (Reuters) – The Manguinhos neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, a slum where addicts once smoked crack and residents dumped trash, has been transformed into a community vegetable garden that now feeds some 800 families struggling with rampant food inflation.

The urban garden covers the area of four soccer fields, according to Rio de Janeiro’s “Hortas Cariocas” program coordinators, making it one of the largest of its kind in Latin America.

“This particular area was used as a ‘cracolândia’,” said Julio Cesar Barros, an agronomist employed by the city. “If you arrived here on a Wednesday at 10 in the morning, you could find two or three thousand people smoking crack in this area.”

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Barros said he helped create the “Hortas Cariocas” project in 2006 to plant vegetables in various parts of the city and supply organic products to lower-income residents. He said urban gardens also helped prevent irregular occupation of dangerous areas prone to flooding or landslides.

A drone picture of a person working at the Horta de Manguinhos (Manguinhos vegetable garden), the biggest urban garden in Latin America, part of the project “Hortas Cariocas” developed by Rio de Janeiro’s Environment Secretary in the Manguinhos favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil December 1, 2021. REUTERS/Pilar Olivares

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“While I am planting [seeds] I am thinking that in a few days I will be harvesting this and taking it home to eat it,” said Diane Silva, an urban farm worker. “I know I am planting to harvest tomorrow … it gives a lot of pleasure to work in a garden, it is a job that we enjoy, I love this.”

The project has now expanded to 49 vegetable gardens across Rio, according to Barros.

Ezequiel Dias, a Manguinhos resident who helps to coordinate the project, said the initiative has transformed his community.

“It changed the face of Manguinhos… our communities need exactly this: peace, happiness and a better life.”

(This story was refiled to remove extraneous word from byline, corrects spelling of byline)

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Reporting by Sebastian Rocandio
Writing by Ana Mano; editing by Diane Craft

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Health

Facebook prioritized ‘angry’ emoji reaction posts in news feeds

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The Facebook Papers are a set of internal documents that were provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.

The trove of documents show how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has, at times, contradicted, downplayed or failed to disclose company findings on the impact of its products and platforms.

The documents also provided new details of the social media platform’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Read more from The Post’s investigation:

Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers

How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India

Have a question about the Facebook Papers? Ask The Post.

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Technology

Google Reader is still defunct, but now you can ‘follow’ RSS feeds in Chrome on Android

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Google Reader is still defunct, but its spirit lives on in a “follow button” for Chrome that Google first started experimenting with in May. The RSS tracking feature was limited to the experimental Canary versions of Chrome on Android, but today the company has started enabling it on stable versions of the browser, according to Adrienne Porter Felt, a director of engineering on Chrome.

You can follow a site through the browser’s three-dot menu to subscribe to its RSS feed and have it update in your Chrome app. Sites you’re following will appear in a tab called “following,” which sits along Google’s “for you” tab of recommended articles. The feature isn’t out yet on iOS, so I’m not able to check it out on my phone, but Felt shared some screenshots of what it looks like on Android so you can get an idea.

The Follow button aggregates content from an RSS feed into cards.
Image: Adrienne Porter Felt

It’s not clear how many people already have access to the new feature by default, but you can enable it yourself by entering chrome://flags in your address bar and turning it on under web feed, Felt writes.

The Chrome follow button is currently a mobile-only feature (iOS and desktop versions are coming), which will surely disappoint some Google Reader power users. Still, it’s at least nice to see Google keeping the RSS fire alive in some fashion. It makes the Chrome app even more crowded in terms of features, but if you were looking for a free, low-fuss way to keep up with some of your favorite sites, it seems like Google is once again willing to be that option.



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Entertainment

John Oliver Feeds Online Frenzy Over ‘Jeopardy!’s Mike Richards – Deadline

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John Oliver wasn’t finished throwing shade at Mike Richards.

Following last week’s quip, this week’s title sequence featured the recently-resigned Jeopardy! host in the final card which reads “Postus Hostus” with Richards’ name labeled beneath an animation of his photo dissolving into gray.

Oliver continued the visual bit in his intro when he usually recaps the week’s most pressing news items.

The British-American host called the disgraced game show ex-host a “smirking golf bag” that “was demoted from hosting Jeopardy! to merely running it.”

On Friday, Richards, a controversial choice ever since he was announced as the host that would replace longtime face of the show Alex Trebek, decided to step down and reopen the search for a new host. This came on the heels of a devastating exposé of past sexist and off-color comments made during a podcast some seven years ago left his position untenable. Richards plans to stay on as the show’s executive producer.

Related Story

Ryan Reynolds Backs LeVar Burton’s Campaign To Host ‘Jeopardy!’ Following Mike Richards’ Exit From Role

Oliver’s remarks come after an internet bonfire that exploded into celebration after Richards’ resignation with personalities openly expressing their satisfaction with the host’s demotion, including a dig by the former Jeopardy! champion James Holzhauer.

“I was really looking forward to the season premiere where after an exhaustive 61-clue search for the next Jeopardy champion, the show looks past the three obvious candidates and declares Mike Richards the winner,” Holzhauer wrote on Twitter.

With the search beginning anew, a slew of celebrities including Ryan Reynolds, Yvette Nicole Brown, Roxane Gay and Leslie Jones have thrown their support behind Reading Rainbow star LeVar Burton to be considered for the hosting gig.

Reynolds took to Twitter on Saturday to express his belief in the Internet’s power and described how he came into his iconic role in the Deadpool movies.

“Pretty consistently from 2013 to 2015, Deadpool would explode on Twitter with fans wanting me to play him. It was awkward, because I agreed with them. But the studio didn’t see it,” Reynolds wrote.

“Ultimately, the fans won, and the rest is glorious history. I’m forever grateful. Hi @levarburton.”



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