Sid Douglas writes on environmental issues. He comes from a long career in fishing, where he is most happy, but is drawn to cover news affecting our natural world. Sid also covers world news, particularly when human rights issues are involved.
[BRIEF] A 30-year-old woman is currently isolated at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Hospital while being assessed for the Ebola virus. The New Mexico Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are conducting tests on the woman.
According to authorities, the woman left Sierra Leone, West Africa earlier this month. Since returning, the woman developed symptoms associated with Ebola, including sore throat, fever, headache, and muscle aches.
The woman was not known to have been exposed to Ebola in Sierra Leone, the health department stated Sunday, but has been isolated while tests are underway.
Ebola has an incubation period between infection with the virus and the appearance of symptoms of 2-21 days. A person is contagious during this time, even if no symptoms are present. The average incubation period is 4-6 days. After symptoms appear, a person will remain contagious for approximately three weeks.
When the Ebola virus enters a host, the virus begins to multiply, and can travel through the blood to the liver, spleen, pancreas, thyroid gland, lungs, kidneys, skin, brain and other organs. Common symptoms include high fever, headache, joint and muscle aches, sore throat, weakness, stomach pain, and lack of appetite.
The first confirmed Ebola death in Sierra Leone took place in May. Earlier this month, the nation’s government imposed quarantines in counties with the highest Ebola infection rates. Some international airlines have suspended flights from Sierra Leone.
More information is expected Sunday evening. A doctor involved in the case has scheduled a press statement for 5:30 PM.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has stuck a blow to planesharing startups such as AirPooler and Flytenow with a recent ruling prohibiting private pilots from offering seats to the public in exchange for compensation.
Planesharing startup AirPooler, already operating in the market, recently formally requested a clarification from the FAA on the issue, which was considered a legal grey area.
“With regard to pilots using the AirPooler website,” ruled the FAA, “all four elements of common carriage are present. By posting specific flights to the AirPooler website, a pilot participating in the AirPooler service would be holding out to transport persons or property from place to place for compensation or hire. Although the pilots participating in the AirPooler website have chosen the destination, they are holding out to the public to transport passengers for compensation in the form of a reduction of the operating expenses, they would have paid for the flight.”
The customary practice of advertising for shared flights on message boards will also now be illegal. Only pilots certified by the US government as air carriers are permitted to receive compensation for flying, according to the FAA ruling. Most pilots do not have air carrier licences, which are relatively difficult to obtain.
The ruling will prevent pilots from cutting expenses by sharing costs, and will reduce travel options, but may prevent travelers from mistakenly booking flights with insufficiently qualified pilots.
AirPooler is not quite finished, however. AirPooler intends to ask for further clarification on the FAA ruling. The recent ruling was based on an unofficial draft for a 1963 proposal for planesharing, but a 1964 regulation allows pilots to privately ask potential passengers if they would share costs if the pilot have already planned the flight, pay a pro-rata share, and adhere to other restrictions.
A forced eviction is set to take place in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in which 20,000 people will be set upon by 10,000 military police if they fail to comply with thousands of leaflets dropped from helicopters over the region, announcing to residents that violence will be their own fault if they fail to evict themselves. The community has stated none will leave their homes.
The military police action was announced despite the absence of a court decision regarding the eviction. The action was announced by means of leaflets dropped from helicopters, warning that failure to comply with the eviction will result in possible violence.
The leaflets stated that the Military Police of Minas Gerais (PMMG) would follow their orders for the repossession of the occupied lands, in accordance with the constitution and the fundamental principles of human rights, and suggested that pregnant women, seniors, children and people with special leave the location for their wellbeing.
“The responsibility for these people’s health lies with the (resistance) movement,” the leaflet stated.
The houses of the 8,000 families will be demolished. No relocation scheme has been set in place, so the evicted will be rendered homeless.
According to the commander of the PMMG, Colonel Machado, “The eviction will take place in the next 15 days, but I will not say the specific day. We will use full force. Leave the area.”
Human rights lawyers are contesting the eviction.
In the absence of legal defense, residents met and decided unanimously to attempt to remain in their homes.
“We will not leave this ground,” said one member of the community, Carvalho Elielma, “It was empty before and now it’s being used for housing. The three communities are united behind this idea,” Elielma said, referring to the affected Rosa Leon, Hope and Victory communities.
Brazilian news organization Averdade predicted that the police eviction may result in a “massacre.”
Belo Horizonte is the sixth largest city in Brazil and has 2.5 million municipal citizens and 5.2 metropolitian residents.
The land is wanted for development. The development is projected to be worth $6.5 billion.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has agreed to an international humanitarian mission to be participated in by Russia, the US and the EU. The mission is to be led by the Red Cross, which stated that the ICRC would be involved in the operation so long as it was “according to our own principles, according to our own modalities.”
US President Barack Obama held a telephone conversation with Poroshenko Monday, in which the leaders agreed that “any Russian intervention in Ukraine without the formal, express consent and authorization of the Ukraine government would be unacceptable and a violation of international law.”
The Russian government also announced its intention to send a humanitarian convoy into Ukraine with Red Cross support. Moscow said that there would not be a Russian military escort for the convoy.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned Putin against any unilateral military action in Ukraine, even if it took place in the context of humanitarian circumstances.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Monday that he thought there was a “high probability” of Russian military intervention in Ukraine, however. Rasmussen said that Moscow was “developing the narrative and the pretext” for military action in Ukraine, noting that Russia had re-amassed 20,000 troops and other military equipment along the Ukraine border.
Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Monday, however, that Russia has currently amassed 45,000 troops at the border, along with thousands of pieces of military equipment, including tanks, missile systems, warplanes and attack helicopters.
The largest of its kind ever mobilized in Australia, the force was launched by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott Sunday with the words, “The Green Army is on the march from today.”
“The Green Army is a hands-on, practical, grassroots environmental action programme that supports local environment and heritage conservation projects across Australia,” according to the organization itself.
“It’s the largest environmental workforce Australia has ever mobilized for land care,” said Abbott.
The Army seeks to recruit 15,000 members. It is targeting Australians aged 17-24, and offers to provide training and experience in environmental and heritage conservation fields and conservation management. At the same time, the Army aims to benefit the environment by staffing real projects. Army workers will receive a wage similar to a traineeship–around US$9.30-14.90 per hour.
Green Army teams will be deployed on 20-26-week projects across Australia. In the next year, 250 projects have been planned. Five hundred are planned for 2015-16, 750 for 22016-17 and 1,150 for 2017-18.
Among these tasks are tree planting, restoring koala habitats, cleaning up creeks and rivers, conserving heritage sites and monitoring endangered species.
The program has been provided with $525 million tax money for four years.
“It’s about projects around Australia, which will help improve river banks, revegetate, encourage threatened species’ recovery, shore up sand dunes, be engaged in the health and rehabilitation of both urban and rural landscapes,” said Abbott. “Secondly, it’s about ensuring that young people have training and work skills and opportunity.”
Australians interested in joining the Green Army are advised to contact a Service Provider in their state or territory.
Today, Thailand’s military government, the Thai National Council for Peace and Order, approved two massive railway projects to link Bangkok and the southern coast with southern China and Laos.
A 737-kilometer line will extend from northeastern NongKhai to coastal Map Ta Phut in Rayong province. Another line will run from northern Chiang Khong in Chiang Rai province to Ayutthaya province.
The lines will run trains capable of 160 kilometers per hour.
The two rails will cost more than $23bn total, and construction is expected to begin next year, with a projected completion in 2021.
The rail lines will eventually be tied into a greater system of high-speed rails that are planned to connect all of Southeast Asia. Much of the push for this network has come from China.
China’s line to connect its southwestern Yunnan Province with Singapore is expected to transform rural Laos, where the majority of the 6.5 million Laotians have never ridden a train. China aims to sell goods in Southeast Asia while receiving natural resources in return.
However, the Chinese plan is not going as smoothly in Burma, where a plan to link Arakan State with China was recently abandoned over potential cost and environmental concerns. The line was to cost $20bn and would have been operated by China for 50 years before being handed over to the Burmese government.
China also has plans to connect to Tibet, India, Nepal and Bhutan by 2020.
One of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), has been convinced to end all logging of natural forests. The Jakarta-based company, which has 14 major companies in Indonesia and China and an annual capacity of 18 million tons of paper and pulp products, has received an endorsement by Greenpeace, long its rival, after signing a contract to log only certain timber lands this week.
APP’s owner and chairman, TeguhGandaWijaya, put his personal seal on the commitment–the first time he has done so on an environmental agreement. The move is expected to cost APP a significant amount of money, but, according to APP’s sustainability managing director, “We now want to be a true global player and true leader.”
APP, which has cleared an estimated 2 million hectares of tropical forest in Sumatra since 1994, will now log only plantation timber, according to the agreement. Its suppliers will be bound to stay clear of timber with high conservation value and carbon-rich peat swamps. They will also be required to obtain “free, prior and informed consent” from landholders upon opening new concessions.
Greenpeace had targeted APP for years in a campaign that cost the logging company over 130 customers. Recently, Disney, Mattel and Hasbro dropped APP due to the Greenpeace campaign.
Although Greenpeace has endorsed APP’s contract, the endorsement was qualified. Greenpeace’s lead forest campaigner in Indonesia, BustarMaitar, said that Greenpeace would continue to “watch and monitor closely” APP’s activities. APP has broken environmental commitments in the past.
“We welcome this move, but we urge everyone to wait and see, after independent monitoring is done,” commented the pulp and paper manager of the World Wildlife Federation, an organization that has seen environmental commitments made by APP broken in recent years.
The area needed to meet the world’s current electricity needs–16,000 TWh/y–would be smaller than a 254 km x 254 km square section of the unused Sahara desert, theoretically. The demand of the EU states only could be met by a 110 x 110 km parcel. A single nation like Germany? 45 x 45 km, which is equal to less 0.03 percent of the suitable areas in North Africa.
This was the finding of the Technical University of Braunschweig’s Nadine May in 2005, when solar cells were much less efficient than today’s.
Researchers testing the amount of plastic garbage polluting the earth’s oceans have discovered a mystery. Instead of finding evidence of the millions of tons of durable plastic garbage expected to litter the ocean surface, they found only tens of thousands.
In the 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 45,000 tons of plastic garbage reached the world’s oceans every year. Today the world produces five times as much plastic as it produced in the 70s, so researches expected to find evidence of millions of tons of plastic garbage in the oceans. They were surprised that after looking at over 3,000 samples, they found only 7,000 – 35,000 tons of plastic garbage.
The research was conducted by ecologists at the University of Cadiz in Spain. The report, “Plastic debris in the open ocean,” was completed by Andrés Cózara, Fidel Echevarríaa, Ignacio González-Gordilloa, Xabier Irigoienb, Bárbara Úbedaa, Santiago Hernández-Leónd, Álvaro T. Palmae, Sandra Navarrof, Juan García-de-Lomasa, Andrea Ruizg, María L. Fernández-de-Puellesh, and Carlos M. Duartei, and was published by the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers do not know where the missing garbage has gone. The researchers did find clues, however. A primary piece of evidence was that far fewer plastic fragments under 5 millimeters were found than larger fragments.
The researchers guessed that somehow the smallest pieces of plastic were finding their way to deeper waters.
Another guess was that mesopelagic fish, which inhabit the oceans at 660-3,300 feet below the surface, were feeding on the plastic fragments when they came to the surface at night. The researchers pointed out that the normal food of these fish is roughly the same size–zooplankton. When the fish excrete the debris, it may sink deeper, or the debris may be carried deeper when the fish die.
Another finding was that bacteria was growing on the plastic fragments. The bacteria’s weight may be pushing the fragments down, the researchers suggested.
These guesses were phrased by the researcher this way: “Our observations of the size distribution of floating plastic debris point at important size-selective sinks removing millimeter-sized fragments of floating plastic on a large scale. This sink may involve a combination of fast nano-fragmentation of the microplastic into particles of microns or smaller, their transference to the ocean interior by food webs and ballasting processes, and processes yet to be discovered.”
The surprising finding led the researchers to conclude a further question was pending. “Resolving the fate of the missing plastic debris is of fundamental importance to determine the nature and significance of the impacts of plastic pollution in the ocean,” the researchers stated.
Two marine researchers have published a report on two prominent near-bottom fish species of the northern seas, looking at how the two species fared in the warming waters of the past decade. The researchers looked at Bering Sea walleye pollock and Atlantic cod, and proposed that the differences in how the two species fared may be indicative of how other species will variously thrive or suffer during global warming.
The northern waters of both the cod and the pollock have warmed over the past decade, but one of the species appears to have prospered, while the other has diminished. “These response patterns appear to be linked to a complex suite of climatic and oceanic processes that may portend future responses to warming ocean conditions,” stated the researchers.
The report explained that Atlantic cod stock biomass has steadily increased since the 1980s, paralleling an increase in northern oceanic tempertures. Atlantic Cod, which spawn in the southern end of their territory, are thought to require warm temperatures to produce strong year classes. “During warming phases,” the report read, “the spawning stock biomass gradually builds up and the cod spawn rather north,” whereas in cooler phases spawning takes place further south. A similar trend of increasing fish stocks accompanied the warming period between the 1920s and the 1940s. The recent success of Atlantic cod stocks is thought to be the result of warmer weather, in addition to the effects of fishing limitations.
On the other hand, Bering Sea pollock–the largest fish stock in the northeast Pacific Ocean–declined in the early 2000. The stock began rising again before 2010, but did not reach pre-2000 levels.
The habitat and diet of pollock is thought to account for the difference. Bering Sea pollock feed throughout the middle and outer shelf regions and generally avoid bottom waters below 0 degrees Celsius–and so are usually found in the southern Bering Sea. The fish expand across the shelf in warmer years. The pollock stock is made up of several age groups, each of which has been affected by prey availability and the ability to accumulate winter stores of energy.
The pollock are thought to be affected by temperature most significantly in the first year of their life–due to the effects of temperature on their first summer.
The report concluded, “The response of seafloor fish species in the border regions between the boreal and Arctic domains to climate variability may provide clues to how future antrhopogenic climate change will influence fish stocks and marine ecosystems at high latitudes.”
The report also made more specific predictions about the future of Atlantic cod and Bering Sea pollock. The cod, which have already reached the shelf break and the deep polar basin, can advance no further north, and so may now advance eastward along the Siberian shelf as new habitats open up due to the loss of sea ice at the Siberian shelf and the Northeast Passage. The pollock face an uncertain future, because the suite of interacting processes that govern their health is more complex, and because sea ice is expected to continue to form in fall and winter, leaving a cold remnant in summer, making the cold pools inhospitable to the fish.
Human Rights Watch has called on the current leader of Europe’s leading human rights body, Azerbaijan, to end persecution of government critics and independent groups. Azerbaijan took over the leadership of the Council of Europe
in Early May amid much criticism due to the country’s human rights record and ongoing human rights violations, which have been documented by international rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In particular, Azerbaijan is criticized for its treatment of news media, government critics and independent groups. Abuse of over 40 activists, journalists, bloggers and human rights defenders has been documented by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Most of these people are now in prison. Azerbaijan uses charges such as drug and weapons possession, incitement to violence, hooliganism, tax evasion and treason against these citizens, as reported by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other international rights groups, although Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly denied politically motivated persecutions.
“It’s sheer irony that Azerbaijan presides over a body whose standards it so flagrantly violates. The Council of Europe’s leadership should not miss this opportunity to urge Aliyev to free people who are behind bars for nothing more than speaking their minds and to allow independent groups to operate,” stated Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director.
In January the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly adopted a resolution that stated, “The combination of the restrictive implementation of freedoms with unfair trials and the undue influence of the executive results in the systemic detention of people who may be considered prisoners of conscience,” and one month before the election of Azerbaijan to the chair, the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Nils Muiznieks issued a statement that read, “Unjustified and selective criminal prosecution of people expressing dissenting views, including journalists, bloggers and activists, continues unabated. This is unacceptable. All those who are detained because of the views they expressed must be released.”
The chairmanship of the Council of Europe is a six-month rotating position.
Recently, a letter penned by a dying Iraq War veteran has been garnering publicity. The letter, written by Thomas Young and addressed to Former US President George W. Bush and Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, criticizes the former American leaders for their role in the 2003-2011 Iraq War.
The letter was written as Young resided in hospice care. The 33-year-old Young was paralyzed in 2004 in Iraq.
The letter, Young wrote, was authored on behalf of the 4,500 dead Iraq war soldiers and Marines and the hundreds of thousands of veterans wounded in that war, as well as their families, and criticizes the “hallowness of character,” “cowardice” and “selfishness” of Bush and Cheney, who themselves, Young writes, dodged the Vietnam draft (Cheney) and went AWOL from a National Guard unit (Bush).
Young said he wrote the letter not because he thought Bush and Cheney would “grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power,” but because Young wanted before his death to “make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.”
“You may evade justice,” Young wrote, “but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”
Young pointed out that preemptive war–such as the Iraq War–is “illegal under international law,” and stated that he did not sign up to fight in a war like the war in Iraq. Young considered that the war “obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East,” “installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government,” and “left Iran as the dominant force in the region.” Young wrote that the war was, on “every level—moral, strategic, military and economic,” a failure, and blamed Bush and Cheney for starting the war.
Young, who wrote that he and other soldiers were used, betrayed and abandoned, “would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks [sic] in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.”
Young called on Bush and Cheney to find the moral courage to face what they had done and apologize to the American and Iraqi publics before they themselves died.
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From: Thomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
