The compensation payments for foot and mouth (FMD) affected livestock units remain pending, Panagrotikos chairman Kyriakos Kailas said on Thursday, pointing out that the delayed payment had prompted concern about the reactivation of the affected farms.

Kailas said that if the reactivation process did not begin within 20 days, the association would request that the compensation for lost income begin without further delay.

“On the issue of compensation, we had mentioned in the meeting held two weeks ago with the authorities that the amount was not satisfactory, the sectors are not benefiting to the extent we would like. The amount of €4.6 million coming from European funds could have been increased by 200 per cent, which was not done. There was a different opinion from the finance minister,” he said.

Kailas explained that this could have made it possible to provide more substantial support and to include sectors that are currently being excluded.

“We are seeing the primary sector wither away day by day. The measures were a step in the right direction; we welcomed them, but they should have been somewhat more generous,” he said.

With regard to the payment of FMD compensation, Kailas said that payments for a total of four units remained outstanding.

“The decision is that everyone should be paid, without exception. You cannot promise someone before their execution that they will be compensated and then find some justified or unjustified reasons not to pay that amount,” he said.

He insisted that the compensation must be paid, and that any irregularities must be investigated, adding that he was concerned about the resumption of operations at the affected livestock units.

“You cannot tell someone after seven or eight months that they won’t be working and then expect them to wait. We understand the difficulties, but on the other hand, those in charge must also understand that people need to get back to work,” he said.

Kailas also expressed his disagreement with the government’s plans for subsidised agricultural diesel.

“We disagree on that point as well. At the end of the day, certain safeguards are being put in place: if some producers have exceeded €5,000 in subsidies, then the scheme is capped; there is a ceiling,” he said.

He said that there is also disagreement regarding the timing of the measure’s announcement.

“Now is when farmers will buy fuel, now are the months of sowing and cultivation. How is it possible to lock it at the end of October? We have suggested to the ministry to leave it open until December,” he said.

Agriculture ministry permanent secretary Andreas Gregoriou had earlier in October announced that outstanding compensation payments would proceed once the culling of a further 2,000 animals had been completed.

People with the APOE4 gene variant have more to lose from unhealthy habits — and potentially more to gain from healthy ones.

© Claire Merchlinsky/The New York Times; Photographs via Getty

For a former Rome bureau chief, Pope Leo’s lung cancer diagnosis prompted pressing questions about life and legacy.

© Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

Two races were held at Fuji Speedway last weekend: the six-hour FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and the Race Against Dementia led by champion driver Sir Jackie Stewart OBE, who returned to Japan 60 years after winning the Fuji 200 race to campaign for his charitable foundation and wave the green flag at the start […]

The post Sir Jackie Stewart brings his race against dementia to Japan appeared first on Asia Times.

Scientists find evidence that microscopic metal debris can reach the brain, while its long-term effects remain unclear.

The post What happens to joint implants over time? appeared first on BOL News.

Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took from the field to the US—many of whom he sexually molested, with the knowledge and, in some cases, approval of his professional peers and colleagues:

In his journals and in letters to colleagues, Gajdusek was self-righteous, arguing that what he’d done was “no more serious than lying on the grass or picking a dandelion,” and he cited the Anga initiation rites as justification. These ceremonies had brought boys into their communities, as part of a shared passage into manhood, but Gajdusek treated them as a timeless license for the acts that he’d committed privately, one boy at a time. George Klein, a professor at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, who was part of the Nobel Assembly for thirty-six years, validated Gajdusek’s opinions, telling him that he wondered if “the Western world can ‘catch up with you.’” He wrote, “I share your indignation about the typically Jewish-Christian-Moslem hypocrisy on sexual matters.” Gajdusek was troubled, though, by how many colleagues wrote letters saying that they knew the charges must be untrue. “I thought better of my friends,” he said. “They are dissimulating and lying.”