Venustum

On 14th July this year, New Zealand intends to commemorate Maori New Year while simultaneously observing its most recent public holiday for the second occasion, following its statutory recognition last year.

On Thursday, at the Dark Sky Sanctuary situated in Lake Tekapo of New Zealand's South Island, festivities preceding Matariki began with the inauguration of a booklet containing karakia (Maori prayer) designated for each of the nine stars of Matariki.

Matariki represents a significant event in the New Zealand calendar, in which the commencement of the Maori New Year is recognized through the reemergence of the Matariki constellation of stars in the evening skies.

According to the Minister of Maori Crown Relations, Kelvin Davis, the booklet will be widely disseminated to schools and communities throughout the country, in order to assist individuals with their respective preparations for commemorating Matariki, thereby serving as a valuable resource.

Matariki was marked for the first time as an official public holiday last year.

"It was a beautiful moment to see how the nation took joy in celebrating and embracing Matariki last year," Davis said.

According to the data, a minimum of 87 percent of the New Zealand population has acquired a certain level of comprehension regarding the purpose and significance of Matariki, David said.

The picture above shows a Yemeni sesame oil seller working at an oil mill in Hajjah Province, Yemen, Jan. 19, 2020

Sesame oil is a cooking oil made from sesame seeds that's popular in Asian cooking.

The most popular species of sesame, Sesamum indicum, is considered one of the oldest oilseed crops to have been domesticated and cultivated by humans. It is grown in fields, reaching heights of up to 1.5 m. Sesame flowers may have different colors, such as white, blue, or purple, and a single plant can yield approximately 80 seeds rich in unsaturated fatty acids.

There are a few varieties made with pressed plain seeds or toasted seeds, and they are used in different ways in Chinese, Japanese, South Indian, and Middle Eastern cuisine. Light sesame oil is typically used as a neutral cooking oil, while toasted sesame oil is used as a flavoring in sauces, soups, and other dishes.

Toasted sesame oil is also known as dark, black, or Asian sesame oil. The light brown to dark reddish-brown oil is made with toasted sesame seeds and has a strong aroma and flavor. A little goes a long way; sesame oil is often used as a finishing oil, adding nutty, toasty flavor to a hot or cold dish.

Typically, the darker the toasted sesame oil, the stronger the flavor. Light sesame oil, also called white or plain sesame oil, is light in color. It's made using raw sesame seeds, resulting in high-heat, low-flavor oil.

Cold-pressed sesame oil is made without the use of heat or chemicals. It's prized for its purity and can be found in health food stores. Blended oils are also available, combining toasted sesame oil with other oils. The result is a cheaper option with a less intense flavor.

Historically, sesame was cultivated more than 5000 years ago as a drought-tolerant crop which was able to grow where other crops failed. Sesame seeds were one of the first crops processed for oil as well as one of the earliest condiments. Sesame was cultivated during the Indus Valley civilization and was the main oil crop. It was probably exported to Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE. An was historically consumed in many socieites in Europe and Asia including Ancient Egypt where it was used as medicine, for cooking, for its fragrance and for lamp fuel.

Tanzania remains the largest producer of sesame oil (followed by Myanmar/Burma, China, India, Japan, South Sudan, and Sudan) and also dominates the global consumption of this product . The market for sesame oil is mainly located in Asia and the Middle East, where the use of domestically-produced sesame oil has been a tradition for centuries.

Sesame oil is most popular in continental Asia, especially in East Asia and the South Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, where its widespread use is similar to that of olive oil in the Mediterranean.

Here is a video from eater .com showing modern sesame oil in the ROK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6yn7MCwzPg

And here is a video of tradtional oil production using a mill and oxen (CW: animal labor) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2xZXufObW8

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Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Monthly queer thread
• 💛 Read about a current topic in the news
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reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
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• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 💙‎Comprehensive list of resources for those in need of an abortion -- reddit link
• 💙Resources for Palestine

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays
• ❤️Mega upload with theory for many tendencies

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Enjoy the baby panda content and do not make the obvious :volcel-judge: comment, I will do it for you as the title is like 1 to 1 :agony-minion:

BTW, eating the Beginning of Summer rice can prevent summer heat.Come on, do what the pandas are doing!

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ipandacom/status/1654637096727113728#m

I saw the photos first: tan, straggly piles along the banks of an otherwise fertile stream. My mind went to worms, and then gnats. I once wrote an article about fungus gnats, the larvae of which sometimes form circles to travel. Was I looking at something like that? A natural phenomenon that covered the stream in thousands of brown, straw-like creatures?

Nope. I was looking at pasta.

Residents of Old Bridge, New Jersey were presented with a mystery this week: Who dumped mounds of pasta in the forest, all along the stream?

The saga began earlier in the week when resident Nina Jochnowitz alerted town officials to the bountiful mess after receiving a complaint from a neighbor. Reportedly, it was loose spaghetti, alphabet noodles, and elbow macaroni.

“There was literally 25 feet of pasta that had been dumped,” she told The New York Times.

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May 3 (UPI) -- Local officials in New South Wales, Australia, are asking residents to keep a respectful distance from a rare animal spotted in the area: an albino echidna.

The Bathurst Regional Council said in a Facebook post that a council employee snapped photos of the ghostly white echidna while out walking Tuesday.

The echidna, named Raffie by locals, is albino, meaning its entire body lacks pigment.

"If you see Raffie out, please feel free to take a couple of snaps but do not approach, touch, or try and contain him. It is important to leave wildlife alone, as you could risk them losing their scent trail or leaving young unattended in the burrow," the council wrote.

Resident Geoff Hadley said he helped Raffie cross a road recently.

"I've seen hundreds of echidnas but I've never, ever seen a white one -- it was just crazy," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Activists from Mexico are decrying the plan as a prime example of “colonial extractivism.”

People were lining up with buckets to get water from a truck last year in Monterrey, Mexico, as two of the city’s three dams almost completely dried up. Now Tesla has plans to build a huge electric car “gigafactory” in that same water-insecure city.

A gigafactory is Tesla’s term for its massive assembly and parts plants. The Monterrey one will be built on 4,200 acres — twice the size of the company’s Texas plant, and around the size of three small towns. While the electric vehicles (EVs) that Tesla builds are meant to ease car pollution, the company is passing the water consumption and the high pollution resulting from its manufacturing process on to Mexico. The cars will be sent to the U.S., as most Mexicans could never afford them.

The Tesla Gigafactory was announced in March, and CEO Elon Musk said it would be “the biggest electric vehicle plant in the world.” The goal is to build the factory this year and have it running next year. Tesla chose Monterrey, in Nuevo Leon state, because of its low-paid workforce, its proximity to its Austin, Texas, headquarters, and the presence of key suppliers nearby.

Last year, for three months, water was rationed for Monterrey residents — it was only available between 4 am and 10 am. People panicked and bought bottled water, to the point where only the smallest bottles were left in shops. Communal owners of ejidos (land owned by communities rather than by individuals or private corporations) protested the lack of water for small farmers and requested economic support because they weren’t able to water crops or feed their animals. Monterrey had “a 40 percent deficit in the necessary amount of water,” Monterrey resident Ismael Aguilar Benítez told Truthout. Specializing in water management, he is a researcher with the Urban and Environmental Studies Department of the Northern Border College (Colef).

“Tesla is aiming to build around a million vehicles, and in one of its reports, it says that it uses 3 cubic meters of water per vehicle, so that’s around double the amount of water than the Texas factory,” he said.

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Thomas advertised her rally online hoping to draw in attendees from the public. She received virtual recruitment help from Known Heretic, or Amy E. Sousa, a TERF YouTuber, and the Gender Mapper, Alix Aharon, a hate monger who documents and makes public doxx lists of gender clinics. These lists are often utilized by the far-right. Thomas received on-the-ground help from a team of east coast TERFs.

Unfortunately for Thomas her propaganda push was unsuccessful and the only people who attended in support of the rally were her team of TERF’s slated to speak and their boyfriends and husbands.

Thomas and her group arrived at 11:45am at the capital building and began to set up around the erected police barriers and launched their live feed via Amy Sousa on YouTube. Almost immediately upon setting up and beginning their speeches the TERFs were drowned out by queer antifascists.

Queer antifascists and other collaborators led the initial disruption actions, preventing the TERFs from being able to broadcast their hate by using megaphones, music, and air horns.

The contingent of Rutgers union strikers, fresh off directing their own protest against the University, showed up on the scene en masse shortly after to offer their support. The large group of Rutgers Union strikers used their megaphones and numbers to completely stop the rally for a period of time causing confusion amongst the TERFs. Thomas and her goons couldn’t seem to process solidarity in action. She and several other TERFs, including an enraged Brittany Ortiz, then took turns yelling at the crowd about their transphobia.

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The wave of new AI chatbots is not stopping anytime soon; another contender has jumped into the ring with ChatGPT.

Released recently, it's called 'HuggingChat.' The main focus of this chatbot is to provide a more transparent, inclusive, and accountable alternative to ChatGPT.

Don't get me wrong, HuggingChat is not the first open-source alternative to ChatGPT. We have covered open-source projects challenging ChatGPT.

However, HugginChat seems to be the first one available to access as a platform that appears similar to ChatGPT.

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https://huggingface.co/chat/

https://huggingface.co/spaces