Europe

German supermarket chain Aldi Süd  has become the first major retailer in Europe to ban pesticides toxic to bees. The ban will include neonicotinoids imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam, from all produce sold in their stores with the retailer expecting fruit and vegetable suppliers to comply with their new policy as soon as possible Beyond pesticides report: Aldi has requested suppliers comply at the earliest possible time. In light of the growing pollinator crisis and due to public pressure, retailers in Europe and the U.S.

“Welcome to Europe. Now gimmie that watch.”

That’s the greeting asylum seekers will get when they enter Denmark from now on thanks to a new law that will allow police to search refugees on arrival and confiscate anything worth more than 10,000 kroner.

The idea, apparently, is to help offset the cost of taking the migrants in by robbing them.

To judge by the early returns, the presidential race of 2016 is shaping up as the most disheartening in recent memory. Other than as a form of low entertainment, the speeches, debates, campaign events, and slick TV ads already inundating the public sphere offer little of value. Rather than exhibiting the vitality of American democracy, they testify to its hollowness.

It has been another volatile, illiquid, whipsawed session, driven by the only two things that have mattered so far in 2016, China and oil.... and stop-hunting algos of course.

International researchers suggest that the descendants of the Black Death that consumed Europe during the first outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 14th century, are the source of subsequent repeated European plague outbreaks that followed in later centuries. Devastating waves of the bubonic plague re-emerged on the European continent over the next four centuries, killing hundreds of thousands, after the initial Black Death claimed the lives of about a fifth of the world’s population and in Europe it killed 30–60% of the populace.