Guyana is located in the northeastern corner of South America. Indigenous peoples inhabited Guyana prior to European settlement, and their name for the land, guiana (“land of water”), gave the country its name.

Christmas is a special time for Guyanese both at home and overseas. Many overseas based Guyanese will try and return home to to visit with family and friends. This makes Christmas extra special.

Leading up to Christmas in Guyana, the streets are filled with shoppers looking for gifts. You can also hear the sounds of vehicle horns blaring in slow traffic and the sound of the Masquerade Bands and their music and dancing.

Some people are also dressed as certain characters and these characters have special dance moves. There can be lots of different groups on the streets at the same time.

In Guyana, people really like to decorate their houses and streets with lots of lights at Christmas time. Traditionally you didn’t put up the decorations until Christmas Eve.

A popular Christmas food in Guyana is Pepperpot. This is a meat stew made with beef, pork or mutton, it is flavoured with cinnamon and a sauce made from cassava root) served with bread.

This is sometimes eaten for breakfast at Christmas. This is a national dish from one of the six races of Guyana, the native Amerindians.

Other Christmas foods include baked chicken or turkey, stuffing, garlic pork, homemade pickled onions and cook-up rice (rice cooked with peas/beans, some meat and lots of herbs and spices, this is another national dish from Afro-Guyanese heritage).

There’s also black cake, a very rich fruit Christmas cake which includes rum. The fruit for the cake is soaked in wine or rum for months before the cake is made. If you visit a house in Guyana over Christmas you have to “try a lil piece”!

Gifts are often exchanged after breakfast on Christmas day.

The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is also a national holiday. It’s a popular time for games and sports as well as another day for visiting friends and family.

The Phosphate Mines, also known as the Phosphate Mines of Nauru, are the remnants of what was once a triving income for the economy of the island nation of the Republic of Nauru.

As Nauru is the smallest nation in the Pacific, it was considered once to be the richest nation, where at the middle of 19 century it was made to be a strip mine exploited at first by the colonial powers, more precisely by the German Empire.

The phosphate deposits are actually the result of thousands of years of bird droppings, which are also known as guano, and as they are near the surface, it does not take much effort to mine the phosphate.

After Nauru gained its independence in 1968, it soon intensified the mining process and large wealth came to the island, which made the economy to be dependent on phosphate.

Unfortunately, by the late 20 century, the country has rendered its own landscape infertile, and the island is mostly a barren wasteland.

The high plateau that is known locally as Topside is the place where once was the location where most of the phosphate deposits were, nevertheless, with the large scale of phosphate mining, almost all of the available phosphate has been mined, and there are only pinnacles left which create a jagged landscape unsuitable for agriculture nor forestry.

Today, 80% of the island is uninhabitable and infertile, leaving everything but the coastal strip to the people from Nauru with hope that the “Certain Phosphate Lands: Nauru v. Australia” case from the International Court of Justice will bring some rehabilitation to the mined-out areas of Nauru.

Basically, Australia’s administration of the island in the past has failed to remedy the environmental damage caused by phosphate mining, and even though it is uncertain whether something will be done by Australia for the nature to be brought back in some kind of livable condition for the locals, they will have to continue to live as one of the poorest nations in the world.

There was once a trust fund for the islanders from the mining which reached 1 billion Australian dollars, nonetheless, the government has made poor investment choices and with the corruption, the fund was left with almost no money, therefore made the Nauru poor with little money.

This began showing also to the locals, as they were fishing and doing little bit of gardening in the past, but with the easy income from the mines, the people stopped farming and began importing canned and frozen food, which is why nowadays, the country has the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the world.

Even though there is still some small amount of phosphate exported, the revenue is still not enough to sustain the population on the island which is reliable on foreign aid, mostly from Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand.

What would happen with the phosphate mines is still debatable and with the rising water levels, the destiny of the people from Nauru is very uncertain whether they would be able to continue living on this small piece of land they call home.

An oil spill in a creek in northeastern Kansas shut down a major pipeline that carries oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, briefly causing oil prices to rise.

Canada-based TC Energy said it shut down its Keystone system Wednesday night following a drop in pipeline pressure. It said oil spilled into a creek in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City.

The company estimated the spill’s size at about 14,000 barrels and said the affected pipeline segment had been “isolated” and the oil contained at the site with booms, or barriers. It did not say how the spill occurred.

“People are sometimes not aware of the havoc that these things can wreak until the disaster happens,” said Zack Pistora, who lobbies the Kansas Legislature for the Sierra Club’s state chapter.

Concerns that spills could pollute waterways spurred opposition to plans by TC Energy to build another crude oil pipeline in the Keystone system, the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) Keystone XL, which would have cut across Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska.

Critics also argued that using crude from western Canada’s oil sands would worsen climate change, and President Joe Biden’s cancelation of a U.S. permit for the project led the company to pull the plug last year.

In 2019, the Keystone pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons (1.4 million liters) of oil in eastern North Dakota.

Jane Kleeb, who founded the Bold Nebraska environmental and landowner rights group that campaigned against the Keystone XL, said there have been at least 22 spills along the original Keystone pipeline since it began service in 2010. She said federal studies have shown the type of heavy tar sands oil the pipeline carries can be especially difficult to clean up in water because it tends to sink.

“All oil spills are difficult, but tar sands in particular are very toxic and very difficult, so I’m awfully concerned,” said Kleeb, who is also the Nebraska Democratic Party’s chair.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said there were no known effects yet on drinking water wells or the public, and the oil didn’t move from the creek to larger waterways. Randy Hubbard, the Washington County Emergency Management coordinator, said there were no evacuations ordered because the break occurred in rural pastureland.

TC Energy said it had set up environmental monitoring at the site, including around-the-clock air quality monitoring.

“Our primary focus right now is the health and safety of onsite staff and personnel, the surrounding community, and mitigating risk to the environment,” a company statement said.

Oil prices briefly surged at midday Thursday amid news of the spill, with the cost of a barrel of oil for near-term contracts rising by nearly 5%, and above the cost of oil contracts further into the future. That typically suggests anxiety in the market over immediate supply.

A U.S. Energy Information Administration spokesperson said the Keystone pipeline moves about 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to Cushing, Oklahoma, where it can connect to another pipeline to the Gulf Coast. That’s compared to the total of 3.5 million to 4 million barrels of Canadian oil imported into the U.S. every day.

Past Keystone spills have led to outages that lasted about two weeks, but this outage could possibly be longer because it involves a body of water, said analysts at RBC Capital Markets in a note to investors. Depending on the spill’s location, it’s possible that a portion of the pipeline could restart sooner, they said.

“It’s something to keep an eye on,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, which tracks gasoline prices. “It could eventually impact oil supplies to refiners, which could be severe if it lasts more than a few days.”

The spill was 5 miles (8 kilometers) northeast of Washington, the county seat of about 1,100 residents. Paul Stewart, an area farmer, said part of it was contained on his land using yellow booms and a dam of dirt. The spill occurred in Mill Creek, which flows into the Little Blue River.

A new 10 MW photovoltaic plant has started production in Tunisia.

The plant, installed by the Italian energy company Eni in the city of Tataouine, will contribute to the country’s decarbonisation process.

It will supply the Tunisian national electricity grid with over 20 GWh of energy per year by ensuring savings of around 211,000 tons of CO2 over the life of the plant.

The plant was built by Societe Energie Renouvelables Eni Etap, or Seree, a joint venture between Eni and Entreprise Tunisienne d’Activites Petrolieres, operating in the production of energy from renewable sources. It was inaugurated with a ceremony in the presence of the Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines of Tunisia Neila Gonji, the Italian Ambassador in Tunisia Fabrizio Saggio and local authorities.

The clean electricity produced in Tataouine will be sold to Societe Tunisienne de l’Electricite et du Gaz under a 20-year agreement.

Saggio said that the inauguration of this plant comes after the recent green light from the EU on funding the 200-km-long underwater power line project connecting Italy and Tunisia to import electricity generated from renewable energy sources.

“It shows the confirmation of Italy’s commitment to support Tunisia and the growing centrality of the renewable energy sector in the cooperation between our countries,” he told Arab News.

In Tunisia, Eni also operates the Adam photovoltaic field, with a peak capacity of 5 MW. The plant is a hybrid generation system, one of the most innovative and efficient in the world.

Eni has been present in Tunisia since 1961. The company’s upstream activities are concentrated in the southern desert areas and in the Mediterranean offshore, through the Global Gas & LNG Portfolio for the management of the Transmed gas pipeline, which connects Algeria to Italy through Tunisia