SYDNEY—An Italian restaurant in Australia has made a 103-meter (338 foot) Margherita pizza to raise funds for firefighters battling bushfires.
The pizza was rolled out in rectangular, meter-long pieces of dough, pieced together and covered with tomato sauce and mozzarella, before being baked using a conveyor oven.
It was then liberally seasoned with basil leaves, oregano and olive oil.
The effort took about 4 hours, according to Pellegrini's restaurant, and yielded 4,000 slices.
The proceeds went to the New South Wales Rural Fire service.
A video of the pizza being made has gone viral on social media with lots of users marveling at its size.
The restaurant is now holding a contest to guess how many kilograms of flour went into making the pizza.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
BRAZIL—The surge in fires in Brazil's Amazon rainforest this year fueled a spike in young children being treated for breathing problems as smoke clouded the air throughout the region, according to a study released on Wednesday.
Roughly 5,000 children aged 9 or younger were treated each month in May and June in 36 areas within Brazil's so-called "arc of deforestation," the area partially encircling the Amazon where destruction of the forest is the highest, according to a study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a public health research institute.
That is double the monthly average for the past 10 years, with the study linking the rise to the forest fires.
The study only examined cases for May and June, the latest data available, when the number of fires were slightly higher than the previous year. But that period is well before the surge in August when fires in the Amazon nearly tripled compared to the same period a year ago.
The number of forest fires in the Amazon for the year had surged to their highest point since 2010 by August, drawing global outcry that Brazil was not doing enough to protect the world's largest tropical rainforest.
Environmentalists and researchers say that farmers and others destroying the forest were purposefully setting the fires. Brazil's government sent in the military to fight the fires and launched an investigation into the causes.
Cristovao Barcelos, one of the researchers who wrote the study, said it stands to reason that with the increase of fires starting from July that the number of cases could also show an increase.
"There's a sequence that starts with deforestation, then comes fires and breathing problems," Barcelos said.
In areas recording more fires than usual, a child is 36 percent more likely to develop respiratory problems, the study said. Barcelos added that 2 percent of the children who sought treatment later died.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil—A fire erupted in a hospital in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, leaving at least 11 people dead and forcing medical staff and desperate relatives to rescue patients from smoke-filled wards.
Hospital authorities said the blaze on Thursday evening was thought to have been caused by a short circuit in a generator, though the city mayor said sabotage could not be ruled out.
Firefighters battled the blaze at the private Badim hospital, near Rio's iconic Maracana World Cup football stadium, for several hours before extinguishing it.
Hospital director Fabio Santoro said Friday that 11 deaths had been confirmed and searches were still underway for one patient who had been reported missing.
Emergency personnel searched through the burned-out building until the early hours of Friday to recover bodies.
The hospital said there had been 103 patients in the building when the fire broke out and that "more than 100 doctors were mobilized to bring help to the victims." Seventy-seven of them had been moved to other hospitals while 14 had been cleared to return to their homes.
During the evacuation, patients on gurneys and stretchers were carried into surrounding streets as ambulances struggled through crowds of curious onlookers to transport patients to other medical facilities.
"The doctor arrived in the room and told us that there was fire and that we had to evacuate as quickly as possible," 58-year-old Teresa Dias, who was visiting her father, told AFP.
"They put him on a wheelchair and tied him up to prevent him from falling out. There were a lot of other sick people on stretchers on the stairs."
Staff wheeled medical equipment outside, and the most seriously ill patients were taken at first to a nearby children's nursery.
Sheets tied together were seen hanging from hospital windows.
SMOKE SPREAD QUICKLY
"I was able to take my mother out of her room and when we got to the fire escape, there were a lot of people running around," lawyer Carlos Otorelo, whose 93-year-old mother is being treated for pneumonia, told the UOL news website.
"It was terrible because the smoke spread very quickly."
Other relatives were forced to wait outside for word on their loved ones as dense black fumes filled the sky.
"I heard the loud noise of glass breaking and thought it was shooting or a robbery when I heard screaming. I went downstairs to see what was happening and I saw a lot of smoke," said local resident Terezinha Machado, 76.
Hospital authorities said smoke spread to all floors of the building, and pointed to a generator in the oldest part of the complex as the probable cause of the fire.
Mayor Marcelo Crivella said investigators would probe whether the fire was an accident.
"Experts will have to find whether anyone was responsible. I hope I am wrong, but we have to check there was no sabotage, we have to investigate," he told reporters when visiting the hospital Friday.
The fire service said the premises had safety certificates.
Rio has been hit by 2 major fires in the past year, including when the National Museum was gutted by flames last September, destroying most of its priceless collections.
In February, 10 teenage members of the Flamengo football club were killed in the prefabricated building where they were staying.
Faulty air conditioning systems were the cause of both fires.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
STOCKHOLM, Sweden—Fashion giant H&M on Thursday announced it was suspending leather purchases from Brazil in response to the Amazon fires that have provoked a global outcry.
The ban comes after US-based VF Corporation, which owns a string of brands including Timberland, Vans and The North Face, announced late last month it would no longer buy leather from Brazil over concerns about the destruction of the world's largest rainforest.
H&M said it was imposing a temporary freeze on orders until it had confidence the leather was not causing "environmental harm."
"Due to the severe fires in the Brazilian part of the Amazon rainforest, and the connections to cattle production, we have decided to place a temporary ban on leather from Brazil," the Swedish clothing retail firm said in a statement to AFP.
"The ban will be active until there are credible assurance systems in place to verify that the leather does not contribute to environmental harm in the Amazon," it said.
The blazes that have engulfed parts of the world's largest rainforest—crucial for maintaining a stable global climate—have sparked a diplomatic spat between Brazil and Europe that threatens to torpedo a major trade deal.
French President Emmanuel Macron has accused his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro of lying to him about his commitments on climate change and vowed to block the EU-Mercosur trade deal involving Brazil that took decades to negotiate.
Bolsonaro last week signed a decree to ban burning throughout the country for 2 months.
H&M was last year among dozens of top fashion industry firms to pledge at UN climate talks to reduce their combined greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
The 43 firms agreed to prioritize "climate-friendly" materials and low-carbon transport, and to stop installing coal-fired boilers at manufacturing sites from no later than 2025.
soure: news.abs-cbn.com
