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The free-to-enter competition, organised by Inspireli Awards in partnership with Beirut City Council, seeks concepts to reconstruct the historic harbour
Researchers Dump Tons of Coffee Waste Onto Degraded Land, 2 Years Later It’s Transformed
Researchers have witnessed incredible results after dumping 30 truckloads of coffee pulp, a waste product of the coffee industry, onto an area of degraded former farmland in Costa Rica. Marking out a control area of a similar size, they were astounded by the change over the next two years.
Dr. Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study which was published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence described the change as “dramatic.”
“The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years,” Cole said, according to a press release, “while the control plot remained dominated by nonnative pasture grasses.”
Director of Slovak Confucius Institute Allegedly Threatens Independent Scholar
Ľuboslav Štora, the former director of the Confucius Institute (CI) in Slovakia’s Bratislava, drew attention for sending intimidating messages in emails to Matej Šimalčík, one of the key independent experts on China in Central and East European countries.
Štora had served as the head of the Slovak branch of communist China’s tech giant ZTE before he worked for the CI, which was founded in 2007 on basis of an agreement between China’s Tianjin University and the Slovak University of Technology.
Šimalčík is the executive director of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS). In 2020, he and Adam Kalivoda published an investigative report titled China’s inroads into Slovak universities: Protecting academic freedoms from authoritarian malign interference (pdf). They warned Slovak academic institutions about the risk of cooperating with Chinese entities, given “the nature of
The Slovak director of the Chinese Confucius Institute in Bratislava, Ľuboslav Štora, sent threatening mail to Matej Šimalčík, one of the key experts on China in CEE countries and the executive director of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS). It reads: “Are you sleeping well? You should be under a lot of stress when you’re walking down the street…”
The director, the former head of the Slovak branch of ZTE, sent the threat shortly after a CEIAS survey exposing the Chinese presence at Slovak universities had been published.
There are three Confucius Institutes in Slovakia, the one in Bratislava was founded upon the agreement with the Slovak University of Technology (STU), and also has the largest number of projects and cooperation with China and Chinese companies.