Campaigners stepping up fight for action to protect beloved south Essex Lake
CAMPAIGNERS concerned about the future of the beloved Canvey Lake have met with a Castle Point MP and called for more to be done to ensure its long-term health.
The meeting comes as the Friends of Canvey Lake group relaunch their 'save Canvey Lake' poster campaign in an effort to raise awareness about what they see as the neglect and mismanagement of the treasured community asset.
Castle Point Council has said it remains committed to protecting the lake and that there is potential for investment if residents desire it.
We're now on WhatsApp! Join our new channel at https://bit.ly/4eGOxig to get all the latest breaking news and exclusive stories delivered straight to your phone.
Alan Tibbit is the chairman of Save Canvey Lake and was one of those to meet with Castle Point's Conservative MP Dame Rebecca Harris earlier this week.
'It is refreshing to see that our MP agrees with us about dredging the lake and our aim is for a complete reset to 2010 levels,' he said – the group would like to see the condition of the lake restored to the quality it was at 15 years ago.
Campaign - Members of Friends of Canvey Lake met with Dame Rebecca earlier this week (Image: Martin England) 'This is now a risk to public health with botulism and algae, and with the recent hot weather, and shallow depths of water, the botulism and algae will only get worse over the coming months.
'Canvey Lake should be for Canvey people, and our councillors need to do something about the issues or let those that care about it take over the running of the lake.'
Determined - The campaigners have launched new posters as part of their mission (Image: Martin England) The residents' concerns around Canvey Lake stretch back years and have seen numerous campaigns launched to address its 'mismanagement'.
As part of their latest project, the group has distributed posters to businesses across the island in the hopes of raising awareness of the issues facing the lake.
After meeting the residents, Dame Rebecca said she understands the council to be working on the issue but believes it still needs dredging.
Beloved - Canvey Lake is a point of pride for residents (Image: Google Maps) Ian Butt, director of place and communities at Castle Point Council said: 'Canvey Lake is an important community asset managed by Canvey Island Town Council.
'The Borough Council will continue to work with the Town Council, residents and other stakeholders regarding the ongoing management and maintenance of the lake.
"Canvey Island has received a £20 million investment through the Government's Long-Term Plan for Towns Programme. If the community and residents choose to prioritise it, part of this funding could be allocated to improvements to the lake."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
Anger and grief in Ahmedabad after India's deadliest crash in decades
Advertisement As of Thursday night, an estimated 269 people were confirmed dead, according to senior police official Vishaka Dabral. But students and faculty at the college believe the number of casualties on the ground may be higher, considering how busy the dining hall was at the time of the crash. Within a minute, the plane had ascended, leveled off, and then plummeted to the earth, erupting into a ball of fire, according to CCTV footage verified by The Washington Post. 'In a minute, everything has changed,' Vagadaya said from the hospital auditorium, where relatives waited Friday to give their blood to help identify loved ones who died in Thursday's crash, and had within a day morphed from a place of panic to a makeshift gathering site for mourners. The plane had been carrying 169 Indians, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese nationals, and one Canadian, according to Air India. The 12 crew members were Indian. Advertisement The pilots of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner - captain Sumeet Sabharwal and first officer Clive Kundar - had issued a 'Mayday' distress call shortly after takeoff on Thursday, India's civil aviation regulatory authority said in a statement provided via WhatsApp. There was no further communication from the cockpit, it said. Air India did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Aviation experts caution that it is too early to determine the cause. India's civil aviation minister tweeted on Friday evening that investigators had retrieved the plane's flight data recorder, one of two 'black box' recorders that airlines typically have. 'This marks an important step forward in the investigation,' Ram Mohan Naidu said. Mohan Ranganathan, a former Boeing 737 instructor pilot, said the CCTV footage shows the aircraft's nose rising again during descent, a possible indication that the pilot stalled while attempting to regain lift. He said preliminary reports can be issued after two weeks of finding the flight data recorder, but a final report can take time. Other analysts pointed to abnormal takeoff configurations. Jeff Guzzetti, a former Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigator, said the videos show the landing gear remained down and the flaps unelevated. 'It happened during the daytime. The visibility was good. So what went wrong?' wondered Jitender Bhargava, a former Air India executive director and author of 'The Descent of Air India,' a book about the financial downfall of the airline. Rahul Bhatia, a medical student at the medical college, was frantic on Friday morning, switching between phone calls and responding to WhatsApp groups, trying to help his classmates find the missing. Advertisement He was still in shock from the stories coming in. He heard that a friend's wife, seven months pregnant, was in the dormitory when a plane ripped through the ceiling and wall. Her unborn child was seen outside her body, Bhatia said he heard - a report that The Post could not independently verify. 'I'll remember this for the rest of my life.' Major aviation disasters are rare in India, though Air India, the country's former national carrier, has been involved in several deadly incidents. In 2020, a flight operated by Air India Express, a subsidiary of Air India, skidded off a runway during a heavy downpour in southern India and broke into pieces, killing 21 who had been on board. In 2010, 158 people died in Mangalore, western India, when an Air India Express plane overshot the runway while landing and crashed down the side of a hill. In 1978, all 213 people aboard Air India Flight 855 perished after the plane fell into the Arabian Sea off the coast of Mumbai shortly after takeoff. There has been 'no accountability,' Ranganathan said. Since its privatization in 2022, Air India - now owned by the Tata Group - has faced a string of regulatory setbacks. In March this year, Air India fired a simulator trainer pilot after a whistleblower alleged that the pilot had failed to properly discharge his duties and misrepresented the number of hours for which simulator training was carried out. Two months before the whistleblower incident, India's civil aviation regulator fined the airline 3,000,000 rupees (about $35,000) after it allowed a pilot to operate a flight without completing the mandatory takeoffs and landings. In March 2024, the airline was found in violation of flight duty time limitations - rules that help prevent pilot fatigue - and fined 8,000,000 rupees (about $93,000). Advertisement Bhargava said none of the violations would have led to safety hazards that 'translate into this tragedy.' 'But, no doubt,' he said, 'at the end of the day, the accountability is with the airline.' Thursday's crash was the first involving Boeing's 787, a fuel-efficient jet introduced by the company in 2009 and dubbed the Dreamliner. The jet that crashed was delivered to Air India in early 2014; it had taken off and landed more than 8,000 times, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm. Analysts said the inquiry is likely to focus on the actions of the pilots, the airline, maintenance of the jet, and Boeing - which has struggled for years to fully recover from two air disasters both involving a smaller jet, the 737 Max, in 2018 and 2019. Those crashes, which were linked to a design flaw, killed a combined 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia. But Bhargava said: 'I will not judge by previous controversies. I will judge by the safety track record of the Dreamliner.' Until Thursday, more than 1,100 Dreamliners in service globally had carried 1 billion passengers with no fatal crashes, according to Boeing. In a news conference on Thursday, US Transportion Secretary Sean P. Duffy said the NTSB and FAA were deploying investigators to assist India in its investigation of the deadly plane crash. Duffy added that it was still very early in the investigation, but promised to take action if there were safety failures. 'If there are initial factors of concern in regards to safety, we will be made aware and we will take action. When one of these planes go down, we take it very seriously,' he said. Advertisement Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday visited the crash site, touring the wreckage and speaking with Viswash Kumar Ramesh, the sole survivor of the 242 people aboard the flight. News outlet ANI released an image of Modi looking up at the aircraft's mangled tail jutting out of the college's wall. The prime minister did not speak to reporters. Back at the Civil Hospital, still bedridden from his injuries, Ramesh spoke briefly to local media. He told the broadcaster Doordarshan that he was on the side of the plane that crashed into the ground floor of the hospital. 'When the door broke, I saw that there was some space for me to get out,' he said, his voice quivering. 'I really don't know how I survived.' Nearby, Hina Kundani trembled with rage inside the crowded hospital auditorium, waiting to provide a DNA sample. Three of her relatives had been aboard the flight. 'This is not the time for a photo session,' the 45-year-old shouted at Harsh Sanghavi, the home affairs minister of Gujarat, who was visiting the hospital at the time. Sanghavi left the auditorium shortly after a Post reporter approached him for comment, and his secretary did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 'We're in trauma,' she told The Post, 'and ministers are taking photos.'
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
‘Without your mum, something is missing': The children left behind by migrant parents
In the village of Salchia, in southern Moldova, 14-year-old Mihail misses his mother. At lunchtime and in the evenings, he calls her on Viber or WhatsApp. But it's not the same as having her at home. 'Without your mum, something is missing, right?' he says. When Mihail was just a baby, both of his parents left the country to find work – a necessity in a poor rural region where opportunities are scarce. He was raised by his grandparents and aunts. Now that he's older, his parents take turns staying with him while the other works abroad. At present, his mother is employed on a farm in Italy. 'He's at a sensitive age now, so one of us is always at home with him. But if neither of us went abroad, it would be hard for us to make ends meet,' says Mihail's father, Leonid. There are millions of children like Mihail around the world, kids whose parents leave their impoverished home regions in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, China or South America in search of work, higher wages and better prospects. Academics refer to them as 'children left behind'. In Moldova, more than 20 per cent of all children are estimated to have at least one parent working abroad. In China, tens of millions of children are believed to have been left in the care of relatives in rural areas while their parents migrate to cities in search of jobs. In the Philippines, one of the world's leading labour-exporting countries, nearly a quarter of children are growing up without one or both parents at home. In Indonesia, over 11 million of the country's 84 million children are thought to live in similar circumstances, while in Venezuela the figure stands at 800,000 out of a total child population of nine million. It's a situation that was once common in Western Europe, particularly during the industrial revolution, when the migration of adults from rural areas to towns and cities – a pattern of development – took off. Weighing up the pros and cons of parental labour migration for the children left behind is no simple task. In many cases, children in these families enjoy better material conditions than their peers. But a large body of research – much of it conducted in China – shows that they also seem to face significantly higher risks of anxiety, depression, and antisocial behaviour. When 29-year-old Moldovan Ecaterina Grati was a child, her father left their home country to work abroad. By the time she was eight and her brother three, their mother had also gone, to Russia. The two siblings were left in the care of their grandmother. 'It was scary, being without both mum and dad,' she recalls. 'I felt very sorry for my little brother. He cried a lot when mum left. We tried to distract him, saying she'd be back soon, and so on. But overall, we both probably felt fear.' Her childhood was tough. At the time, she couldn't understand why her parents had gone, but she now recognises they had no real choice. There were simply no other means of making a living and giving their children a decent life. 'For my parents, it's still a painful subject,' she says. 'Mum always cries when we talk about that time.' Growing up, she more or less raised herself and took on a big share of responsibility for her little brother. But the hardship also brought strength. She developed a strong sense of initiative and independence, traits that have served her well in adult life. Today, at 29, she runs her own cleaning business. 'My childhood taught me that you have to rely on yourself,' she says. The ability to take responsibility and act independently is a trait that sociologist Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri and her husband and colleague, social scientist Áron Telegdi-Csetri, have also observed in children left behind by migrating parents. The couple, based at the CASTLE Centre for the Study of Transnational Families at Romania's Babeș-Bolyai University, have studied children in Romania, Ukraine and Moldova. 'Many of them even tend to view children whose parents stay with them as spoiled,' says Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri. The children were often also understanding of why their parents had left. Áron Telegdi-Csetri recalls interviewing a Ukrainian teenager who was asked whether his parents had involved him in the decision to work abroad. 'There was nothing to discuss, not even for our parents. They had no choice,' he replied. Because the phenomenon still carries a degree of structural stigma in parts of Eastern Europe, the researchers sometimes encountered what Áron describes as 'a peculiar reflex' among the children. 'I've noticed that they'll say other parents might have abandoned their children – but 'my parents didn't abandon me.' There's a strong impulse to defend them,' he says. In the early years after her parents left, Ecaterina Grati could barely speak to them at all, a silence that only deepened her sense of abandonment. 'Phone calls to Russia were expensive, and this was before video calls became common,' she says. Later, as communication technology improved, keeping in touch became easier. But even today, many parents can't afford mobile data for video calls in the first months after migrating, says Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri. Until they've earned their first pay cheques, contact with children back home can be sporadic at best. That's why the CASTLE project has proposed that local authorities provide emergency communication kits to transnational families. 'Because the first months of migration are the hardest,' says Viorela Ducu Telegdi-Csetri. China is believed to have the world's largest population of left-behind children – a result, in large part, of the hukou system, a household registration policy that restricts access to public services for rural migrants working in cities. As a consequence, many parents are forced to leave their children behind in home villages while they seek employment in urban areas. Xiaojin Chen, a sociologist at Tulane University in the United States, has spent several years studying China's left-behind children. Unlike the Romanian researchers, he hasn't observed a trend toward greater independence and sense of responsibility among these children. Rather the opposite. 'A lot of times, the grandparents become very protective. They know that they have the responsibility to make sure the children are safe,' he says. Many studies have highlighted negative psychological effects experienced by China's left-behind children, such as depression. But results vary and Xiaojin Chen argues that psychological well-being is difficult to measure. 'On average, compared with children who live with both parents, these children may be a little more isolated, and they're probably not as active as other kids,' he says. Yet, he often observes that the social bonds with grandparents can, in many cases, almost entirely replace those with the parents, who may only see their children once or twice a year. 'In Western culture, we tend to assume that the emotional bond must come from the nuclear family. But in more traditional rural China, a strong emotional connection with grandparents can be enough. If that bond exists, the child should be fine,' says Xiaojin Chen. From time to time, moral debates flare up in China, where migrant families are stereotyped as dysfunctional. Parents are cast as neglectful, their left-behind children traumatised and with grandparents ill-equipped to care for them. It became especially clear last spring, after three 13-year-olds in the Hebei Province murdered another 13-year-old whom they had bullied for a long time. Both the victim and the perpetrators were children of migrant workers and had been left in the care of relatives. Xiaojin Chen has not found any strong evidence that left-behind children are significantly more prone to criminal behaviour, although some studies suggest otherwise. What he has observed, however, is an increased risk for some of these children to become victims of bullying or sexual abuse, particularly when no strong guardian is present. Overall, it is children who grow up with both parents absent and only a single grandparent – often elderly and frail – who are most at risk, Chen argues. 'That is a huge risk factor,' he says. When Xiaojin Chen reflects on the long-term social consequences of millions of Chinese children growing up without their parents, he sees one threat in particular. What will happen to the intergenerational informal contract – the long-standing expectation in rural China that children will care for their parents in old age? 'The emotional connection between parents and the children left behind is very weak. Will they really take care of their migrant parents when they become older? We don't know that yet.' In Moldova, Ecaterina Grati sees how children who, like her, grew up without their parents often end up following the same path. 'Most children in such families grow up believing that the only way to earn a decent living is by going abroad. They have no role models who've succeeded at home,' she says. Even though she now understands why her parents made that choice, she could never bring herself to leave her six-year-old daughter behind to work in another country. 'I don't want my child to go through the same thing.' But 14-year-old Mihail has already made up his mind. He plans to do exactly what his parents did when he's older. 'I will leave,' he says. 'There's nothing here. No jobs, no people. Everybody already left.' Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
Bodies of husband and wife taken into Gaza by Hamas recovered after special operation by Israeli forces
The bodies of a couple taken into Gaza by Hamas during the 7 October attacks have been recovered by Israeli forces, the country's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced. He said the bodies of husband and wife Judi Weinstein Haggai, 70, and Gad Haggai, 72, were recovered during a special operation by the Israeli military and the country's security agency, Shin Bet. Mr Netanyahu said they were killed on 7 October, 2023, and their bodies taken into Gaza by Hamas. In a statement, he said: "Together with all the citizens of Israel, my wife and I extend our heartfelt condolences to the dear families. "Our hearts ache for the most terrible loss. May their memory be blessed. "We will not rest or be silent until we return all of our abductees home - the living and the dead alike." The Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum has been campaigning for the safe return of all Israeli citizens held hostage by Hamas. The hostage families said in a statement: "The return of Judi and Gad is painful and heartbreaking, yet it also brings healing to our uncertainty. "Their return reminds us all that it is the state's duty to bring everyone home, so that we, the families, together with all the people of Israel, can begin the process of healing and recovery. "Decision-makers must do everything necessary to reach an agreement that will return all 56 remaining hostages - the living for rehabilitation and the deceased for burial. There is no need to wait another 608 agonising days for this. "The mission can be completed as early as tomorrow morning. This is what the majority of the Israeli people want." Most of the hostages returned alive to Israel so far have been released as part of deals with Hamas during two temporary ceasefires in late 2023 and early 2025. The most recent ceasefire that saw a pause in the fighting and the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners fell apart in March. Israel has rejected calls for an unconditional or permanent ceasefire, saying Hamas cannot stay in Gaza. Read more from Sky News: On Wednesday, the US vetoed a draft UN Security Council resolution that demanded an "immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire" between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza and unhindered aid access across the the war-ravaged territory. The other 14 countries on the council voted in favor of the draft. "The United States has been clear: We would not support any measure that fails to condemn Hamas and does not call for Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza," said Dorothy Shea, acting US ambassador to the UN, ahead of the vote. She told the council it would also undermine US-led efforts to broker a ceasefire. This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the latest version. You can receive breaking news alerts on a smartphone or tablet via the Sky News app. You can also follow us on WhatsApp and subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep up with the latest news.
