THE PROVINCIAL government of Iloilo and the Department of Education recently spearheaded a synchronized school cleanup against dengue mosquitoes. “Brigada Kontra Dengue” involved parents, teachers, barangay officials, and school alumni, among others.
To be effective, the school-based cleanup must be done regularly, and consistently. This makes sense because students are dengue-vulnerable.
Schools – and the larger community – should go all-out for source elimination to beat the dengue outbreak. We surely can reduce, if not wipe out, dengue by eliminating all possible breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the dengue vector that breeds in clean standing water, particularly in places where water collects and where there is poor drainage and sanitation.
Anyone can help by observing, for example, the following simple but effective steps: Cover water buckets, barrels and tanks with lids. Empty and clean water containers thoroughly once a week. Replace water in flower vases weekly. Clear rain gutters of leaves and other debris. Puncture or cut old rubber tires used as roof support. Remove trash that can collect and hold water. Easy, right?
We must also emphasize proper management of common household and personal trash. Discarded glass and plastic bottles, tin cans, coconut shells, plastic bags, polystyrene containers, snack packs, and sachets should not be simply thrown anywhere as these items can gather and hold water and turn into mosquito breeding sites. Dry leaves, twigs and mixed trash should not be burned as this will not kill dengue-carrying mosquitoes but only emit health-damaging pollutants. Reduce, reuse and recycle your discards instead.
Also, pay attention to how recyclables are stored, ensuring that they are kept dry and clean so as not to attract mosquitoes, as well as roaches and rodents. Community and school storage facilities for recyclables should be spick-and-span and protected against rain and waste water as they should be.
Let us be reminded of proper land management, too, to prevent water from collecting, making sure that pits are filled, drains around taps and wells are running, and canals and esteros are garbage-free and flowing.
Community-based mosquito surveillance and control, including the enforcement of ecological solid waste management, is a basic element in winning our battle against this health and mortality threat.
Colin Dacre – Aug 28, 2019 / 6:43 pm | Story: 264622
Photo: CTV News
A former Amazing Race Canada contestant has died after falling from a B.C. mountain peak.
CTV News reports search and rescue teams were called after Kenneth McAlpine failed to return from a hike on Mount Gimli, west of Slocan, on Monday.
South Columbia Search and Rescue said they spotted the hiker Tuesday morning while being flown onto the mountain in a helicopter.
McAlpine was about 250 metres below the path where he was believed to be hiking. The recovery process was highly technical and required a second helicopter and long-line team.
McAlpine appeared on Season 5 of The Amazing Race Canada on “Team Give’r” with friend Ryan Lachappelle.
The Canadian Press – Sep 4, 2019 / 7:47 am | Story: 265041
Photo: The Canadian Press
Police wait near a woodland area in Cercedilla, just outside of Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2019.
Spanish police found the body of former alpine ski racer and Olympic medallist Blanca Fernández Ochoa in a mountainous area near Madrid on Wednesday after days of searching for her.
Police said a tracking dog came across a woman’s body near a peak in the forested area.
Unidentified police sources told Spanish private news agency Europa Press the body was the 56-year-old Fernández’s, Spain’s first female Winter Olympic medallist .
She won a bronze skiing for Spain in the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville.
Friends of her family at the scene confirmed the identification of her body to public broadcaster TVE, and politicians tweeted condolences.
Police declined to confirm the identification to The Associated Press, saying formal procedures had to be followed before an official announcement was made.
Fernández was last spotted on surveillance video at a shopping mall on Aug. 24.
More than 200 police officers on foot and horseback, firefighters, forest rangers and hundreds of volunteers had combed the steep pine-forested area for days looking for Fernández.
Never before has one studio so dominated summer at the movies.
The Walt Disney Co. accounted for about half of all ticket sales in U.S. and Canada theatres on the season, which came to a close Sunday with the Gerard Butler action thriller “Angel Has Fallen” topping the box office for the second weekend.
Summer ticket sales finished 2% behind last year, according to data firm Comscore, a slight downturn that came despite an unprecedented display by Disney. The studio’s approximate $2.2 billion in domestic summer box office is greater than that of all the major studios combined.
Summer, which for Hollywood runs from the first weekend in May to Labor Day, traditionally ends with a whimper as few new releases seek to draw audiences over the holiday weekend. That was especially true this weekend as nothing new dented the top 10. Lionsgate’s “Angel Has Fallen” came on top again with an estimated $11.6 million.
The final numbers on Hollywood’s summer didn’t add up to the box-office bonanza that some predicted. Instead, the main storyline on the summer came to be the yawning gap between Disney and the rest of the industry. Disney finalized its $71 billion acquisition of 20th Century Fox in March, but it was the studio’s own offerings that propelled its market dominance.
Five of Disney’s films crossed $1 billion this summer, including the season’s biggest hit, “The Lion King.” It currently ranks seventh all-time globally with $1.56 billion in ticket sales. “Avengers: Endgame” ($2.796 billion) opened in late April, just before the summer began. “Toy Story 4” and “Aladdin” both easily cleared $1 billion. The only non-Disney film in the summer’s top four was Sony’s “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” and that film was produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios.
Disney has been the market leader for the last four years in Hollywood as its high-priced acquisitions — Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, and now Fox — have given the studio the intellectual property firepower for a movie world increasingly focused on franchises.
Only one original film this summer ranked among the top 10, and it came in 10th. Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” will have made an estimated $130.8 million through Monday domestically, plus sizable ticket sales abroad. It, along with “Spider-Man,” helped lead Sony to its best summer since 2006 — but a distant No. 2 to Disney.
Disney’s success has been a welcome dose of reliability for theatre owners in need of sure-hits amid widespread anxiety over the rise of streaming. And it has prompted fears of cultural monopoly.
“For the industry, I think it’s a point of stress, to put it mildly. Other studios are now strategizing around Disney. That’s what you have to do,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. “But lest we think Disney was the only game in town, there were other studios that found opportunities within the calendar.”
Lionsgate was among those that eked out some breathing room. Along with its August successes (“Angel Has Fallen,” ”Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), the studio’s “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” was, with $170.9 million, one of the summer’s biggest successes.
“For me it’s important to dispel that audiences are only going to see Marvel and Pixar and the big tentpole,” said David Spitz, president of domestic distribution for Lionsgate. “Movies like ‘Scary Stories’ and ‘Good Boys’ and ‘Angel Has Fallen’ prove that there is an audience for that. ‘Good Boys’ was very encouraging because prior to that it was: ‘Comedies are dead. They’re just for streaming.’ And that’s not the case.”
Universal’s “Good Boys,” the first R-rated comedy to land No. 1 in more than three years, proved that conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong. But other acclaimed comedies that were expected to pop — such as Amazon’s “Late Night,” United Artists’ “Booksmart” and Lionsgate’s “Long Shot” — didn’t.
Counterprogramming often simply didn’t work. And neither did gloomy-looking critically panned movies such as “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” and “Dark Phoenix.” They were among the season’s biggest flops.
Music continued to fuel modest hits, including Paramount’s “Rocketman” and Universal’s “Yesterday.” But by the end of summer, as the lacklustre performance of Warner Bros.’ Bruce Springsteen-inspired “Blinded by the Light” showed, that trend may be waning, too.
Dergarabedian noted, though, that the summer season isn’t quite what it used to be. Studios now spread their biggest movies around the calendar more freely. Add “Endgame” to the totals and the summer looks a lot better. Next week will bring “It Chapter Two” from Warner Bros, which is expected kick off the fall season with a bang. After it comes, anticipated sequels for “Frozen,” ”Star Wars” and “Jumanji,” along with big-budget originals including “Ad Astra,” ”Ford v Ferrari,” ”Gemini Man” and Netflix’s “The Irishman.”
But after a sluggish spring, overall ticket sales are down 6.3% on the year according to Comscore. And when factoring in inflation and higher ticket prices, not since 1992 have fewer summer tickets been sold.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theatres, according to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday through Sunday are also included.
1. “Angels Has Fallen,” $11.6 million.
2. “Good Boys,” $9.2 million.
3. “The Lion King,” $6.7 million.
4. “Hobbs & Shaw,” $6.3 million.
5. “Overcomer,” $5.7 million.
6. “Ready or Not,” $5.6 million.
7. “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” $5 million.
8. “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” $4.3 million.
9. “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” $4.1 million.
It happened around 6 p.m., when a van travelling southbound at a high rate of speed left Highway 97and flew over a chain link fence before hitting a building.
The Canadian Press – Sep 11, 2019 / 12:50 pm | Story: 265621
Photo: Contributed
A doctor whose focus is on public health says he will soon be dispensing opioids through a vending machine in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in order to prevent overdoses from fentanyl-laced street drugs.
Dr. Mark Tyndall says the machine that’s been created in Toronto would scan a patient’s hand for identification before dispensing a pre-programmed number of hydromorphone pills that are a substitute for heroin.
Tyndall, who’s also a professor of medicine at the University of B.C., says the pills cost about 35 cents each and focus groups with drug users have suggested most people would need about 10 to 16 pills a day.
He says the pain medication sold under the brand name Dilaudid is typically crushed and injected by people who may have previously used OxyContin, before that drug was made more difficult to tamper with following multiple fatal overdoses.
Hydromorphone is currently provided through a limited number of Vancouver clinics offering supervised injection to those experiencing severe substance use disorder.
However, Tyndall says rigid requirements that have people returning multiple times a day are impractical and expensive compared with his plan, which could be in the works within a few weeks as a way to curb overdose deaths.
The Canadian Press – Sep 3, 2019 / 8:38 am | Story: 264938
Photo: The Canadian Press
A TSX tote board is pictured in Toronto.
Canada’s main stock index fell in late-morning trading as the heavyweight energy, financial and industrial sectors weighed on the market, as U.S. stocks also tumbled.
The S&P/TSX composite index was down 64.11 points at 16,377.96.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 369.69 points at 26,033.59. The S&P 500 index was down 25.70 points at 2,900.76, while the Nasdaq composite was down 79.40 points at 7,883.48.
The Canadian dollar traded for 74.95 cents US compared with an average of 75.22 cents US on Friday.
The October crude contract was down US$1.79 at US$53.31 per barrel and the October natural gas contract was up 6.1 cents at US$2.35 per mmBTU.
The December gold contract was up US$26.80 at US$1,556.20 an ounce and the December copper contract was down 3.95 cents at US$2.51 a pound.
The Canadian Press – Sep 10, 2019 / 10:20 am | Story: 265496
Photo: CTV News
A second man has been charged after an attack on a referee and a coach at a recent youth hockey tournament in Lethbridge, Alta.
Police say a 36-year-old man they had been seeking turned himself in Sunday evening, hours after the on-ice scrap at the three-on-three tournament
Todd William Cross Child, a 36-year-old Lethbridge resident, is facing two counts of assault and has been released on a promise to appear in court Oct. 9.
Robert Farrell Creighton, a 55-year-old resident of Standoff, Alta., was previously charged with assault and will appear in court the same day.
Police have previously said a player got into a verbal spat with a referee, which escalated to the youth striking the official twice with his stick and the ref pushing the player to the ice.
A group of coaches and a relative of the player then walked onto the ice, where a coach from the opposing team was allegedly shoved down and the ref was punched multiple times by the relative and a second man before the fight ended.
The annual Quest for the Cup tournament involved players between the ages of seven and 12 and was organized by the Lethbridge-based skills development business High Performance Hockey.
A young travel-blogging couple driving across Asia and the Middle East — and posting aerial video footage online — is in custody in Iran for flying their drone without a permit near the capital city of Tehran.
“The family says this was a misunderstanding and [they] were unaware of the Iranian law which bans drone flights without a license,” Pouria Zeraati wrote.
In blog posts, the couple wrote that they decided to quit their jobs in Perth, Australia, and drive a modified Toyota Land Cruiser across Asia, the Middle East and Europe “to hopefully inspire anyone wanting to travel.
“And also try to break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad rap in the media,” they said.
On June 30, the couple posted a since-deleted video from Iran in which Firkin said they’d just arrived and were “camped on a nice hill here next to the capital Tehran,” according to the Times of London.
King has been told by Iranian authorities that she’s being held in hopes of arranging a prisoner swap, a source told the Times.
In April, an Iranian official publicly offered to release another woman jailed in the country on espionage charges in exchange for an Iranian woman who at the time was being held in Australia pending extradition to the US.
Mark Firkin and Jolie King
Instagram
Jolie King and Mark Firkin
Instagram
Mark Firkin and Jolie King
Instagram
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif didn’t identify the Iranian woman during his speech to the Asia Society in Manhattan, but shared a description matching that of Negar Ghodskani, who was indicted on federal conspiracy, smuggling and other charges in 2015.
Ghodskani allegedly violated US sanctions on Iran by using a front company in Malaysia to illegally purchase some 200 pieces of “sensitive export-controlled” technology from two American companies in 2011.
The electronic gear was then shipped to an Iranian company, Fana Moj, that is designated a “military supporter” of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Ghodskani, 40, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge last month in Minneapolis and faces up to five years in prison.
“There is no prisoner swap,” her court-appointed lawyer, Robert Richman, told the Post by e-mail on Thursday.
The Canadian Press – Aug 13, 2019 / 8:20 am | Story: 263414
Photo: CTV News
The racial slurs and intolerant comments made by an ostensible supporter of the federal Conservatives have no place in the country, the party’s leader said
Andrew Scheer condemned the comments captured in cellphone video of the woman, who was arrested after spitting on and shouting at a man outside Toronto City Hall on Monday afternoon.
In the clip, posted to the website Reddit, the woman is heard yelling at the man while she holds a sign expressing support for Scheer in the upcoming federal election.
Scheer took to Twitter to distance himself from the woman after the video circulated online.
“I don’t know who this woman is, but there is no place in our party or our country for her hateful language,” he wrote. “I condemn her behaviour and racist comments.”
The video shows the woman standing in the public square outside city hall while hold a sign that says “vote Andrew Scheer.” She is heard using profane language and shouting that Canada is “a place of men” and not “savages.”
“I can’t believe you’re real,” the man shooting the video is heard saying before the woman is seen rushing up and spitting on him and the camera.
“Go home,” she screams. “You don’t belong here.”
Toronto Police Const. Caroline de Kloet said police were called to the scene shortly after the incident on Monday, though she did not say who made the report.
The woman was arrested and charged with one count of assault for spitting on the man, de Kloet said, adding that the woman remained confrontational after being taken into police custody.
De Kloet alleged the woman assaulted three police officers after her initial arrest and is now facing three additional counts of assaulting a peace officer.
Her name and age have not been officially released.
