Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond

Founder of Wokonda Andrea Ortenzi pours a low-calorie drink obtained from pressed prickly pears pads at Wakonda headquarters in Rome, Italy, October 7, 2024. (REUTERS)
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Founder of Wokonda Andrea Ortenzi pours a low-calorie drink obtained from pressed prickly pears pads at Wakonda headquarters in Rome, Italy, October 7, 2024. (REUTERS)
Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond
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Light flour obtained from dried out prickly pears pads is seen at Wakonda headquarters in Rome, Italy, October 7, 2024. (REUTERS)
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Updated 02 December 2024
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Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond

Cactus pear is a crop with potential in Italy’s parched south and beyond
  • The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in much of Latin America and the Mediterranean, while in Mexico the flat green pads that form the arms of the cactus, are used in cooking

Global warming, drought and plant disease pose a growing threat to agriculture in Italy’s arid south, but a startup founded by a former telecoms manager believes it has found a solution: Opuntia Ficus, better known as the cactus pear.
Andrea Ortenzi saw the plant’s potential 20 years ago when working for Telecom Italia in Brazil, where it is widely used as animal feed. On returning to Italy he began looking at ways to turn his intuition into a business opportunity.
He and four friends founded their company, called Wakonda, in 2021, and began buying land to plant the crop in the southern Puglia region where the traditionally dominant olive trees had been ravaged by an insect-borne disease called Xylella.




Prickly pear cactus plantation is seen in Tepeteopan, state of Puebla, Mexico January 16, 2020. Picture taken January 16, 2020. (REUTERS)

The damage from the plant disease has been compounded by recurring droughts and extreme weather in the last few years all over Italy’s southern mainland and islands, hitting crops from grapes to citrus fruits.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Italian agriculture hit by drought, plant disease

• Start-up Wakonda sees huge potential for cactus pears

• Cactus’ cultivation is expanding in many countries

• Versatile crop has many uses, from animal feed to fuel

Ortenzi is convinced the hardy and versatile cactus pear, otherwise called the prickly pear or, in Italy, the Indian fig, can be a highly profitable solution yielding a raft of products such as soft drinks, flour, animal feed and biofuel.
The Italian businessman is far from alone in seeing the potential of the plant, whose cultivation is expanding in hot and dry regions around the world.
“As an industry, cactus pear production is growing rather quickly, especially for fodder use and as a source of biofuel,” said Makiko Taguchi, agricultural officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization headquartered in Rome.

MULTIPLE USES
The cactus produces a tasty fruit eaten in much of Latin America and the Mediterranean, while in Mexico the flat green pads that form the arms of the cactus, are used in cooking.
In Tunisia, where it covers around 12 percent of cultivated land, second only to olive trees, the cactus pear is a major source of income for thousands, particularly women who harvest and sell the fruit.




A selction of products obtained from prickly pears pads are seen on dispaly at Wakonda headquarters in Rome, Italy, October 7, 2024. (REUTERS)

In Brazil, which has the world’s largest production, it is mainly cultivated in the north-east for fodder, while Peru and Chile use it to extract a red dye known as Cochineal, used in food and cosmetic production.
Sportswear group Adidas and carmaker Toyota have recently shown interest in using the cactus to produce plant-based leather sourced mainly from Mexico.
The cactus pear is not yet included in the FAO’s agricultural output statistics, but Taguchi cited the rapid expansion of CactusNet, a contact network of cactus researchers and businesses worldwide which she coordinates.
The FAO launched the group online in 2015 with 69 members. It now has 933 members in 82 countries. The plant, native to desert areas of south and north America, thrives in the increasingly arid conditions of Italy’s south, and needs ten times less water than maize, a comparable crop whose byproducts also include animal feed and methane.
So far Wakonda, an American Indian word meaning nature’s omnipresent creative force, has planted just 10 hectares of cactus with 40,000 plants per hectare, but Ortenzi plans to plant 300 hectares by the end of 2025, and he is thinking big.
Of the roughly 100,000 hectares of olive trees destroyed by Xylella in southern Puglia, only 30,000 will be replanted in the same way, he told Reuters in an interview.
“Potentially 70,000 could be planted with prickly pears,” he said.
In the long run the possibilities could be even greater, Ortenzi said, considering more than a million hectares of arable land have been abandoned in Italy in recent decades as climate change has made it more difficult to produce traditional crops.

WAKONDA’S MODEL
Wakonda’s business model discards the fruit and focuses instead on the prickly pads, which are pressed to yield a juice used for a highly nutritious, low-calorie energy drink. The dried out pads are then processed to produce a light flour for the food industry or a high-protein animal feed.
Wakonda’s circular, ecological production system also includes “biodigester” tanks in which the waste from the output cycle is transformed into methane gas used as a bio-fuel either on site or sold.
The company, which now has 37 shareholders, is in contact with mayors, firms and universities to develop its products.
Under Ortenzi’s business plan, rather than buying up land to plant the cactus, Wakonda aims to persuade farmers of its potential and then license out to them, in return for royalties, all the equipment and know-how required to exploit it.
“The land remains yours, you convert it to prickly pears and I guarantee to buy all your output for at least 15 years,” Ortenzi said.

 


Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sues NBC over new documentary as he awaits trial on sex trafficking charges

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sues NBC over new documentary as he awaits trial on sex trafficking charges
Updated 12 February 2025
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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sues NBC over new documentary as he awaits trial on sex trafficking charges

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sues NBC over new documentary as he awaits trial on sex trafficking charges
  • The lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York state court
  • The documentary premiered last month on Peacock TV, the network’s streaming service.

NEW YORK: Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is suing NBC Universal over a documentary that he says falsely accuses him of being a serial murderer who had sex with underage girls as he awaits trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York state court says the documentary, ” Diddy: Making of a Bad Boy,” included statements that NBC Universal either knew were false or published with reckless disregard for the truth in order to defame the founder of Bad Boy Records.
“Indeed, the entire premise of the Documentary assumes that Mr. Combs has committed numerous heinous crimes, including serial murder, rape of minors, and sex trafficking of minors, and attempts to crudely psychologize him,” the complaint reads. “It maliciously and baselessly jumps to the conclusion that Mr. Combs is a ‘monster’ and ‘an embodiment of Lucifer’ with ‘a lot of similarities’ to Jeffrey Epstein.”
Spokespersons for NBC Universal and the entertainment company that produced the documentary, which is also named in the suit, didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment. The documentary premiered last month on Peacock TV, the network’s streaming service.
“From his childhood to becoming a mogul, this raw look at Sean Combs’ journey through exclusive footage and candid interviews explores his rise, controversies and the man behind the music,” a description of the documentary on Peacock’s website reads.
Combs, who is seeking no less than $100 million in damages, has been in Brooklyn federal prison since his September arrest on racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges.
Federal prosecutors say he used his wealth and influence to coerce female victims and male sex workers into drug-fueled, dayslong sexual performances known as “Freak Offs.”
They say Combs used blackmail and violence to intimidate and threaten his victims in a pattern of abuse that goes back to the early 2000s.
Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His trial is slated to start in May.
Erica Wolff, an attorney for Combs, said NBC and the other entities named in the suit “maliciously and recklessly broadcast outrageous lies” in order to “line their own pockets” by driving viewership to the documentary.
“In making and broadcasting these falsehoods, among others, Defendants seek only to capitalize on the public’s appetite for scandal without any regard for the truth and at the expense of Mr. Combs’s right to a fair trial,” she said in a statement. “Mr. Combs brings this lawsuit to hold Defendants accountable for the extraordinary damage their reckless statements have caused.”
Combs’ lawsuit says the documentary “falsely, recklessly, and maliciously” accuses him of murdering Kimberly Porter, Christopher Wallace and Dwight Arrington Myers, among other notable names.
Porter, a model who had been Combs’ longtime girlfriend and the mother of some of his children, died in 2008 at the age of 47 from complications from pneumonia.
Wallace, the rapper known as The Notorious B.I.G., was killed in 1997 in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting in Los Angeles at age 24.
Myers, the rapper known as “Heavy D,” died from a pulmonary embolism in 2011 at the age of 44.
“It shamelessly advances conspiracy theories that lack any foundation in reality, repeatedly insinuating that Mr. Combs is a serial killer because it cannot be a ‘coincidence’ that multiple people in Mr. Combs’s orbit have died,” the complaint reads.
Elsewhere, the complaint says the documentary delved into claims Combs had sex with underage girls, citing as evidence a civil complaint that’s been “thoroughly discredited.” Combs’ lawyers say the women referenced in that complaint have since confirmed they were adults at the time.


Scientists reveal how to make dogs pay attention

Scientists reveal how to make dogs pay attention
Updated 12 February 2025
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Scientists reveal how to make dogs pay attention

Scientists reveal how to make dogs pay attention
  • The scientists would point at the bowl while staring at the dog, or point and look at the bowl at the same time, or look only at the bowl

PARIS: Struggling to get your dog to fetch your slippers? Scientists who strapped eye-tracking helmets to a bunch of dogs have found the perfect tactic to get them to pay attention.
Both pointing and staring at an object is the best way for dog owners to get their pets to follow directions, according to a new study on Wednesday.
The owner’s gaze and gesture are useful separately, “but combined they are stronger,” lead study author Christoph Voelter of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna told AFP.
The team of Austrian researchers put headgear on 20 dogs to detect exactly where the pooches looked when they were confronted with a range of scenarios.
The test subjects included eight mongrels as well as Staffordshire terriers, Australian shepherds and poodles.
For the experiment conducted in the university’s Clever Dog Lab, each canine faced a scientist on their knees. A bowl was placed on each side of the scientist, only one of which contained a hidden treat.
The dogs were then presented with five different scenarios, six times each.
The scientists would point at the bowl while staring at the dog, or point and look at the bowl at the same time, or look only at the bowl.
They even used the classic prank that many dog owners play on their pets — they pretended to throw a ball in the direction of the bowl, while really keeping it in their hand.
Recordings from the headgear showed that the dogs fared best when the scientist both pointed and stared at the bowl that contained the treat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they did the worst when the scientists pretended to throw the ball.

For the researchers, this finding pointed toward the hypothesis that dogs follow human referential communication cues, rather than simply directional ones.
In other words, the dogs could understand the meaning of the information they were being given — in this case, a treat is that way — rather than just running in the direction they are being pointed.
But the researchers were careful not to hastily draw conclusions.
Exactly how much the dogs understood what is happening remains an open question, Voelter emphasized.
“Is it for them more like an imperative directive to go somewhere? Or do they understand it more in a communicative way?” he said.
More research in this field of natural pedagogy would be needed, according to the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The field normally studies how communication clues — such as pointing and looking at an object while naming it — help young children learn the names of everything around them.
The researchers are also looking into how this works for dogs, Voelter said.
The next step is figuring out whether dogs are also better at learning and memorising things “when we address them,” he added.
 

 


Indian police shut down Ed Sheeran’s street gig

Indian police shut down Ed Sheeran’s street gig
Updated 10 February 2025
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Indian police shut down Ed Sheeran’s street gig

Indian police shut down Ed Sheeran’s street gig
  • British singer-songwriter and four-time Grammy winner is touring the world’s most populous country
  • Sheeran denied he had broken the law, saying he had been granted permission to busk ‘in that exact spot’

BENGALURU, India: Pop megastar Ed Sheeran has denied that he unlawfully serenaded the Indian public after police said he lacked the necessary permission to play and abruptly terminated a street performance.

The British singer-songwriter and four-time Grammy winner is touring the world’s most populous country but took time out between concerts to busk to a surprised crowd in tech hub Bengaluru on Sunday.

Videos shared on social media show a police officer disconnecting his microphone midway through a rendition of his hit “Shape of You” on Church Street, a bustling retail hub.

Local authorities said that while Sheeran had a permit to play at concerts, that did not extend to impromptu outdoor performances.

“He is a very famous singer and naturally there will be chaos. To prevent that, police had not given him permission,” Karnataka’s home minister G. Parameshwara said on Monday.

“In spite of that, he has come and tried to perform, so police prevented him. Nothing beyond that.”

 

 

Sheeran denied he had broken the law, saying he had been granted permission to busk “in that exact spot.”

“It wasn’t just us randomly turning up,” he wrote on Instagram shortly after the incident, adding magnanimously that it was “all good though.”

Local lawmaker PC Mohan said on Sunday that “even global stars must follow local rules — no permit, no performance!”

Social media users were critical of the police yanking out Sheeran’s microphone cables, with one calling it “abysmal and embarrassing.”

Another criticized Indian police for failing to effectively prosecute crimes against women, but Sheeran “singing on the street is where they draw the line.”

Sheeran is currently on a six-city tour of India and also had a sold-out performance in Mumbai last year.

Booming demand from young affluent Indians looking to splurge on new entertainment experiences are drawing international acts to play in the country.

British rock band Coldplay performed what it called its “biggest-ever show” at a massive cricket stadium in the western city of Ahmedabad in January.


Super Bowl halftime performer detained after unfurling Sudanese-Palestinian flag

Super Bowl halftime performer detained after unfurling Sudanese-Palestinian flag
Updated 10 February 2025
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Super Bowl halftime performer detained after unfurling Sudanese-Palestinian flag

Super Bowl halftime performer detained after unfurling Sudanese-Palestinian flag
  • The NFL confirmed the person was part of the 400-member field cast
  • The performer stood on a car used as a prop for Lamar’s performance and held up the flag

NEW ORLEANS: A performer in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show was detained on the field and could face charges after unfurling a combination Sudanese-Palestinian flag with “Sudan” and “Gaza” written on it.
The NFL confirmed the person was part of the 400-member field cast. The New Orleans Police Department said in a statement that “law enforcement is working to determine applicable charges in this incident.”
“The individual will (be) banned for life from all NFL stadiums and events,” NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy said in an emailed statement.
The performer stood on a car used as a prop for Lamar’s performance and held up the flag. The NFL said “the individual hid the item on his person and unveiled it late in the show” and that “no one involved with the production was aware of the individual’s intent.”
Roc Nation, the entertainment company which produced the show, said that the act “was neither planned nor part of the production and was never in any rehearsal.”
The show continued without interruption, and it did not seem as though the person was shown on the broadcast of Lamar’s performance.


Afghan wedding halls light up somber Kabul nights

Afghan wedding halls light up somber Kabul nights
Updated 10 February 2025
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Afghan wedding halls light up somber Kabul nights

Afghan wedding halls light up somber Kabul nights

KABUL: As night settles over Afghanistan’s capital, only a few small lights and neon signs pierce the darkness and thick blanket of winter pollution.
But on some street corners, glittering colossal wedding halls loom out of the gloom, a rare display of opulence in the Afghan capital.
The city of more than six million people is often plunged into shadow due to ubiquitous power outages, which only the wealthiest can remedy with expensive generators or solar panels.
Apart from a few vendors, the streets are deserted, a stark contrast with the chaotic hustle of the daytime.
People huddle at home to shelter from the cold and for lack of nighttime activities.
Since the Taliban took power in 2021 and imposed their strict version of Islamic law, a veil of sadness has enveloped the capital.
There is no music spilling out from restaurants because it is forbidden, women are banned from parks, and walls decorated with colorful pro-peace graffiti have been splashed with calls to holy war.
The only bright lights emanate from the wedding halls that dot the city center and escape some of the Taliban’s scrutiny, as marriage is prized in Afghan culture.
The high-ceilinged halls are segregated by gender, with music only tolerated on the women’s side.
“In Afghanistan, the marriage ceremony is the most important event for girls and boys. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event — we don’t have much divorce,” said Mohammad Wassil Qaumi, director of the Imperial Continental, a palatial white-and-gold hall that shines with a glitz reminiscent of a Las Vegas casino.
“It’s the start of a new life so the light should be everywhere, that’s why the city is bright, it should have a little bit of luxury!” he told AFP.

DECORATIONS
Bunches of plastic flowers, throne-style sofas, gilded trimming and neon lights fill the complex’s four halls, some of which can accommodate up to 7,000 guests.
Qaumi, 32, says he spends $25,000 to $30,000 per month for municipal electricity, which provides a few hours of power per day.
To keep the lights on, he also pays just under $15,000 for generators.
To recoup his costs, he charges up to $20,000 for a wedding, in a country where 85 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
“Weddings are a necessity in the Afghan culture, you have to invite more and more people” even if it means going into debt, said Hajji Safiullah Esmafi, owner of the Stars Palace hall.
In another district of the capital, the City Star welcomes its guests with a beige and gold facade topped with three sculpted domes and a huge sparkling arch out front.
“Electricity is very expensive,” admits the owner, 24-year-old Siyer Paiman.
But, he added, “people in Afghanistan like bright colors.”

ELECTRICITY
He has invested in solar panels and spends the equivalent of $12,000 to $19,900 on generators and electricity, which only covers six to seven hours a day, “and not always at night.”
Afghanistan depends on its Central Asian neighbors for imported electricity.
With the hopes of increasing supply, the country is involved in several regional interconnection projects, but progress is slow.
“The current demand in Afghanistan is about 7,000 to 8,000 megawatts but they currently produce locally about 1,000 megawatts and import the rest from Central Asia,” a sector expert who asked for anonymity told AFP, adding that renewable energy sources should be developed but that funding was lacking.
Power cuts also affect heating, with temperatures easily dropping below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit).
Kabul’s residents use stoves, burning almost anything from coal and wood to plastic or household waste, creating a fog of pollution in the city slung between mountains 1,800 meters (5,900 feet) above sea level.
In the nighttime gloom, wedding halls are “the brightness of the city,” said Qaumi. “Here, everyone is very happy.”
“People come here to meet friends and family, (they) wear new clothes, jewelry... showing off so much,” he said of patrons enjoying one of the only places left in Kabul where this is still possible.