FLOODS FILL SOME OF CALIFORNIA’S SUMMER STRAWBERRY FIELDS
Most of the plants already in the ground when levee broke near farming area
As river water gushed through a broken levee, thousands of people in a California farming town were forced to evacuate as their homes were flooded and businesses destroyed.
Yet another potential casualty of the powerful rainstorms that drenched coastal California: hundreds of acres of fresh strawberries slated for America's supermarket shelves this summer.
Industry experts estimate about a fifth of strawberry farms in the Watsonville and Salinas areas have been flooded since the levee ruptured late Friday about 70 miles
south of San Francisco and another river overflowed. It's too soon to know whether the berry plants can be recovered, but the longer they remain
underwater the more challenging it can get, said Jeff Cardinale, a spokesperson for the California Strawberry Commission.
“When the water recedes, what does the field look like — if it is even a field anymore?” Cardinale said. “It could just be a muddy mess where there is nothing left.”
For years, California's farmers have been plagued by drought and battles over water as key sources have run dry. But so far this winter, the nation's most populous state — and a key source of food for the nation — has been battered by 11 atmospheric rivers as well as powerful storms fueled by arctic air that produced blizzard conditions in the mountains.
Many communities have been coping with intense rainstorms and flooding, including the unincorporated community of Pajaro, known for its strawberry crop. The nearby Pajaro River swelled with runoff from last week's rains and the levee — built in the 1940s to provide flood
phones of government officials, and it was described by Dowden as a proportionate approach to addressing a potential vulnerability of government data.
TikTok has long insisted that it does not pass on information to the Chinese government. In a statement Thursday, TikTok said it was disappointed with the British government’s decision, saying that the bans imposed on it were “based on fundamental misconceptions and driven by wider geopolitics.” It added that it was taking steps to protect British users’ data.
In the United States, the White House told federal agencies Feb. 27 that they had 30 days to delete the app from government devices. More than two dozen states have banned TikTok on government-issued devices, and a significant number of colleges have blocked it from campus Wi-Fi networks. The app has been banned for three years on U.S. government devices used by the Army, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and the Coast
Guard.
On Wednesday, TikTok said the Biden administration was toughening its stance about addressing national security concerns, telling the company that it would need to sell the app or face a possible ban.
Several British government departments have TikTok accounts as part of their public outreach, including the country’s defense ministry, and as recently as one day ago, Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, said the app was safe for British people to use.
“In terms of the general public, it is absolutely a personal choice, but because we have the strongest data protection laws in the world, we are confident that the public can continue to use it,” she told lawmakers in Parliament.
China has featured prominently in an updated security review published by the government, although Sunak’s toughened language failed to satisfy all the hawks in his Conservative Party, including one of its former leaders, Iain Duncan Smith.
Duncan Smith questioned whether the British government officially considered China to be a threat, and on Thursday, while he praised the action against TikTok, he called for the ban to be extended to private devices belonging to government officials.
That followed a decision by China in December to withdraw six of its diplomats from Britain, after a diplomatic standoff between London and Beijing in the wake of a violent clash during a pro-democracy demonstration at the Chinese Consulate in the northern city of Manchester.
British authorities had asked six Chinese diplomats to waive their official immunity to allow police to investigate how a protester from Hong Kong was injured after being dragged onto the consulate grounds and beaten Oct. 16.
Instead, China decided to repatriate the six officials, including one of its senior diplomats, the consul general, Zheng Xiyuan, who had denied beating a protester, without denying involvement in the incident.