Millions of mice have invaded Bulgaria's northeastern wheat belt region of Dobrudzha and are threatening to turn it into a desert by devastating next year's grain crops, now sprouting in the fields. \nFarmers say mice hordes were reproducing and spreading quickly because of the unusually mild weather conditions in Bulgaria in mid-winter. \n"I have done farming for over 35 years and I had never before seen such a disaster," says Dimitar Kantardzhiev, chairman of the union of grain producers in Dobrich. \nAlmost 90 percent of the 112,000 hectares of wheat and barley crops in the region of Dobrich are criss-crossed by mice tunnels and perforated by their holes. \nExperts have seen the concentration of mice spiral upwards, especially during the last two months. \nGrain stocks, however, have not been threatened by the hordes of hungry rodents yet. In 2004 Bulgaria exported 624,000 tonnes of wheat out of 3.59 million tonnes of produce, and 281,000 tonnes of barley out of 1.07 million tonnes of crops, Agriculture Ministry data show. \n"If we can treat the fields with chemicals, what is to be done about the forests and the road ditches where the mice multiply before invading the fields," complains Kantardzhiev who has sown 1,600 hectares of wheat. \nSpring-like temperatures in Dobrich, where thermometers this week soared to 19 degrees Celsius, throw farmers into despair. \n"If nature does not help us, we will be lost. Rain and cold can do away with part of the mice," says Stoyan Kovachev, a farmer from the Black Sea town of Kavarna to the east, who works 5,000 hectares of wheat. \n"The unusually mild and dry weather during the winter months is stimulating this terrible boom in mice reproduction: a mouse of 20 days can bear a population of dozens. If the problem is not solved until April, wheat and barley sprouts will all be chomped up and the yields will be destroyed," he adds. \nAround 500,000 hectares or a half of all wheat and barley crops sown last fall in Bulgaria are hit by the disaster. \nIrreparable damage has been done to 25,000 hectares of grain where crops would have to be sown again next spring. Agriculture Minister Mehmed Dikme has promised government subsidies for farmers to buy pesticides. \n"He has to be quick because we are being ruined," says Velika Slavova, president of a farmers' cooperative in Ichirkovo, in the Silistra region to the northeast. \n"The mice, ten times more numerous than usual, invaded at first some badly worked fields in our cooperative. The remains of plants and weeds left in the fields, which have not been ploughed deep enough, have attracted the mice," she adds. \n"The fertile lands are divided into small fields, whose owners rent them out for short periods, and this does not permit the farmers to devise a long-term strategy," explains Ivan Ganev, president of the cooperative union of Silistra. \nThe lands, nationalized during communism, were returned after its fall in 1989 to their owners, who did not have the means and machinery to work their fields. In the region of Silistra, 20 percent of all arable land belongs to small farmers who have neither joined a cooperative, nor rented their land out. \n"The lands worked in a primitive manner are centers for the spread of disease. The crops are not in jeopardy yet we are facing a hard battle. Poison has to be placed by hand in every mouse hole, in order not to kill any wild life," Ivan Ganev says. \nFarmers, however, are not that patient in their methods. Many ecological organizations have warned against their return to some banned pesticides like arsenic and zinc phosphate, which are dispersed on the land's surface. \nTwo months ago such pesticides poisoned dozens of eagles, deer, hares, partridges and pheasants. \nVelichko Velichkov, a Ministry of Environment expert, denied the possibility of any risk for the people arising after the use of such pesticides. \n"These substances cannot pass into the grain and the bread," he said.
China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors. Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the
Iran’s top diplomat on Saturday condemned Israel’s latest airstrike on Syria, and criticized recent threats from Turkey about another planned incursion by Ankara into northern Syria. Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Hossein Amirabdollahian’s remarks came at the start of his visit to Syria, where he was expected to discuss mutual relations and regional affairs with top Syrian officials. Iran has been one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s strongest backers, sending thousands of fighters from around the region to help his troops in Syria’s 11-year conflict. The war has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced half of the country’s pre-war population of 23
OPPOSITION PROTESTS: Many people in Myanmar suspect China of supporting the military takeover, while Beijing has refused to condemn last year’s army power grab China’s top diplomat on Saturday arrived on his first visit to Myanmar since the military seized power last year to attend a regional meeting that the Burmese government said was a recognition of its legitimacy and opponents protested as a violation of peace efforts. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is to join counterparts from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation group in the central city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The grouping is a Chinese-led initiative that includes the countries of the Mekong Delta, a potential source of regional tensions
CERN UPGRADES: ompared with the collider’s first run that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, this time around there would be 20 times more collisions Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From today it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week. It is to send two beams of protons
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