This post is a labour of sweet love. I’ve been listening to an audio book about Seafaring and Trade in the Mediterranean and it mentioned the town of Jaffa (apparently also known as Yafa).
As a child I can remember seeing the label in the Supermarket, I always associated Oranges with the name Jaffa. Oranges seemed sweeter when I was a child.
I didn’t know the History of the Jaffa Orange and was unaware of the sadness attached to it. “The Land of Sad Oranges” is the title of a famous story by the late Palestinian Journalist and writer Ghassan Kanafani that tells the story of the life of a young child growing up in an orange grove in Palestine. The history of the Jaffa orange has strong symbolism with the Palestinian’s connection with the lands and the immense loss they have suffered.
Sad to say at the beginning everyone worked together to make the Jaffa Orange a success story. It was a sweet orange with a thick peel, ideal for the export market. Arab cultivation was regarded as labour intensive but in actual fact it was probably the best way to harvest the original crop and it brought wealth to the region.
Nowadays , the crop is not a pure Jaffa Orange , and it can come from a number of Countries depending on the season. In fact now it is an all year round orange which means Jaffa is a brand. It and other fruits are grown under the Jaffa brand and sold in Tesco.
It originated in Palestine, but globalisation and the situation in the Middle East has led to the name Jaffa becoming a brand.Who cares for the fruit or where it comes from as long as we put it on the supermarket shelves and it’s fit to eat and we make money out of it.
I think if I saw the label “Jaffa” on a supermarket shelf, I would walk by because to me it is a sad orange. However, if things change and there is Peace and Prosperity in Palestine and the Oranges are grown in a Cooperative way where everyone benefits from the crop, then I would look differently at the “fruit” and it would no longer be a sad orange but a happy orange.
Thanks to Tony Fisher and BBC Online News for the Headline
Thames Valley Police have thanked farmers and residents for the help they provided to prevent a field fire spreading to its stables. Thankfully the actions of those who came to help meant that they didn’t need to evacuate the yard and the horses were kept safe.
The local people arrived with their own machinery to spray the fire and soak the paddocks ,creating a vital fire break. The Fire Brigade followed through and ensured the fires were extinguished. Meanwhile local people had turned up with horse boxes just in case the horses had to be evacuated.
This is really an inspirational story and it’s lovely to hear about everyone helping in what must have been a very terrifying situation for the horses and the people who look after them.
Thanks to Sertac Aktan and Euronews Online for the Headline
This article covers what is happening in Spain, France and finally Greece with the extreme heat and the lack of rain that has hit Europe over the last couple of months.
Thankfully , the fire in a waste management plant in Spain did not cause any fatalities, but there was an issue with airborne pollution. The Nuclear plants in France are owned and run by EDF. They have fifty seven plants which are all located near rivers to be close to a water supply for cooling the reactor. Three plants have been shut down due to low water levels and to reduce the impact on the local environment.
Finally in Greece, unfortunately wildfires have caused the death of five people over the last two weeks. A senior wildfire meteorologist said that it was “one of the worst fire crises I have seen in the last eight to ten years”. He added that no direct comparison can be made until the end of the “fire season” to establish quantitatively the burnt areas and number of ignitions.
More than twelve thousand hectares of forest and agricultural land have burned over the past week , according to analyses by the European Union’s Copernicnus Earth Observation Programme.
And here’s the rub, the Senior Meteorologist who says that until the results are analysed at the end of the “fire season”, says that though Climate Change may be playing a role, that there is also a significant contribution from”failures in land management”.
Funny all our Media talk about is Climate Change and Windpower, no one ever talks about “failures in land management”.
Thanks to Holly Rattley and George Sharpe and BBC News Online for the headline.
The Crammers in Devizes in Wiltshire is a famous landmark with a history of smuggling with 16th century ne’er do wells hiding their contraband in the pond which was called the Crammer and claiming that when they were retrieving their ill gained goods by raking the river that they were in fact looking for a cheese that had fallen from the “Moon”. Hence the name the Moonrakers which a pub nearby is called.
I have often passed by that pond driving through Devizes and I didn’t know that story. However the locals are concerned as the Crammer has entirely dried up in the current series of Heatwaves. It has no underground spring, or any tributaries to bring it water and until there is significant rainfall it will not fill again.
Sadly as the Council says, that to ensure that the Crammers does not dry out would take investment and it’s up to the whole town to decide if that is what they want to spend their vital resources on.
Thanks to the Telegraph’s Crime Editor Martin Evans and the “From the Telegraph” Editor for the Headline.
The move to less “County” Forces and bigger Police Institutions is what the Police Chiefs will want to progress with. The head of “Wiltshire Police ” has already said that she thinks in order to achieve more effective policing that there will need to amalgamate Forces. Wiltshire and Thames Valley for example.(my suggested choice so the County Lines criminals can be monitored)
Modern policing is less about a nice reassuring patrol and an “Evening All” Dixon of Dock Green style and now more about CCTV, AI and gathering information quickly and efficiently.
Modern Policing Policy today is highly influenced by the Police’s own Institutions , however, the Government of the time will always put their pennyworth in and interestingly enough the Police are not happy about releasing prisoners from our already overcrowded (some privately run) prisons early and also at the possibility of “serious criminals” being given “In the Community Sentences”.
Politicians on the other hand see it differently, Criminals should be made to do Community Service and given unpleasant jobs like cleaning up fly-tipping ( I would imagine that’s a pretty specialist job, particularly if the Council’s are trying to trace the culprit and also ensure the environment is cleaned up properly) or erasing vandalism (how about we make them climb walls and cross railway lines to get to the offending material). Health and Safety would have a field day.
With recent political developments some Criminals are not going to jail at all or having an early release. The Police say this will affect their call handling staffing ( which is pretty much automated) as well as their Neighbourhood Patrols as they need their resources to keep an eye on these early release “Serious, Criminals”.
What we really need is some crime statistics that say Crime is reducing and ignore the specifics and sadly the victims. Let’s face it statistics can prove anything and Crime is a numbers game and face to face policing is old fashioned and costly. Big organisations are better than small organisations. Empathy and Social Work is not the Police’s job, “locking them up is”.
AI Generated Image (At least this way we know where the criminals are)
Thanks to Keno Verseck and DP News for the Headline
The article was originally written in German and translated for the publication online. This probably explains why it was written as a list and a very abrupt question. How do Eastern Europe Countries commemorate the Roma Holocaust?
In Germany itself, the EU designated day of the second of August each year , decided on in 2015 is marked by memorial services, educational activities and public addresses. As you can imagine the holocaust of European Roma and Sinti took place was over 80 years ago before these memorials were put in place. They estimate over 500,000 Roma and Sinti were systematically rounded up and killed. We could just as easily ask why the delay in recognising these crimes against an Ethnic Group ?
Still it’s a good article and takes the form of a list which I summarise.
Poland: ( current Roma population 50,000) has been observing August the second since 2011. Including visits by parliamentary and government representatives to the Auschwitz Memorial. In addition on July the third at the village of Szczurowa, east of Krakow the memory of Polish Roma massacared by German Troops in 1943 is honoured. In 1956 Szczurowa became the first site of a European memorial for victims of the Romani Holocaust. Other small towns and villages across southeastern Poland also commemorate the killing of Polish Roma during the Nazi German Occupation.
Czech Republic: ( current Roma population 250,000) . The most recognised memorial which Roma organisations have been commemorating for decades is a Lety , south of Prague. This is the site where German Nazis established a concentration camp in 1940 and began deporting and imprisoning Romani families from occupied Bohemia from 1942 onwards. However August the second is now officially recognised by officialdom as a Day of Remembrance for Romani who lost their lives in the Holocaust.
Slovakia :(current Roma population 500,000). Romani Holocaust Memorial Day has been observed on August the second since 2005.
Hungary: ( current Roma population 600,000). Since a Parliamentary Resolution in 2005 various sites have been observing the Romani Holocaust Memorial Day on August the second. Hungarian Roma were the target of deportation and killings particularly following the German occupation in 1944 and under the rule of the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s fascist regime.More recently the memorial includes those Roma people who were killed between 2008 and 2009 by four Hungarian neo-Nazis, killing a total of six people and injuring fifty-five others. Sad to say they planned their final hate crime for the night of August the second in the Eastern Village of Kisleta.
Romania ( current Roma population 2 million). Roma Holocaust Memorial Day has officially been observed since 2020.In 2025 President Nicusor Dan became the first Romanian head of state to personally attend the memorial service at the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest.
Bulgaria:(current Roma population 700,000) Although Bulgaria was allied with Nazi Germany during the War , they resisted German demands to deport Jews and Roma, but there was discrimination within Bulgaria and these groups were subject to being treated as second class citizens. August the second has yet to be declared an official day of remembrance but it is still marked with commemorative events organised by Roma organisations and in some instances supported by the Government.
Croatia: (current Roma population 25,000) In 2014 Parliament declared August the second a day of Remembrance . The main commemorative ceremony is held at the site of the former concentration and extermination camp Jasenovac where the fascist Ustashe movement imprisoned Serbs, Jews, Croats and Roma. Jasenovac also commemorates the attempt at escape by those imprisoned on the twenty second of April 1945.
North Macedonia: ( current Roma population 100,000). Since 2017 the second of August has been officially observed at a ceremony held in Skopje at the Holocaust Memorial Centre for the Jews of Macedonia, however as it is also a National Holiday , Republic Day and St Elijah’s Day respectively. So the Public Remembrance of the Roma Holocaust tends to receive less attention.
Serbia: (current Roma population 130,000) There is no official memorial day for the Roma Holocaust. There are other days set aside for remembering the genocidal policies of the Nazis and the Ustase regimes which also honor the memory of the Roma killed in the genocide.
Memorial honoring the Sinti and Roma victims of the Holocaust in Berlin (AI generated image)
thenotsomightyom 