Madagascar’s forests plundered for rare rosewood

August 17th, 2010

Rosewood traders turn up in villages on the Masoala peninsula with cash and rice. They want local people to help them find precious rosewood trees in the dense forest, and then to haul the heavy logs out.

The illegal trade is irresistible to poor communities. Local people used to make money from tourists who came to see the lemurs – primates found only in Madagascar.

This was a national industry worth more than $400m (£256m). But last year’s military-sponsored change of government has frightened off all but the most intrepid international travellers.

In March 2009, Marc Ravalomanana was forced into exile and replaced as president by Andry Rajoelina, a 36-year-old former mayor of the capital, Antananarivo.

The international community deemed this a coup and refused to recognise the new regime. Large donors like the World Bank, the European Union and the United States withdrew all but humanitarian aid from President Rajoelina’s government.

This has had a dramatic impact as more than half of Madagascar’s budget had come from international donors.

Illegal logging on the rise

Since the political crisis began, the forests of Madagascar have been plundered. In 2009, loggers took an estimated 100,000 rosewood and ebony trees from the national parks of north-east Madagascar.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, CrashBlogging, Extinctions, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Rice yields ‘to fall’ under global warming

August 17th, 2010

Global warming is set to cut rice yields in Asia, research suggests.

Scientists found that over the last 25 years, the growth in yields has fallen by 10-20% in some locations, as night-time temperatures have risen.

The group of mainly US-based scientists studied records from 227 farms in six important rice-producing countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, India and China.

This is the latest study to suggest that climate change will make it harder to feed the world’s growing population.

In 2004, other researchers found that rice yields in the Philippines were dropping by 10% for every 1C increase in night-time temperature.

That finding, like others, came from experiments on a research station.

The latest data, by contrast, comes from working, fully-irrigated farms that grow “green revolution” crops, and span the rice-growing lands of Asia from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to the outskirts of Shanghai.

Describing the findings, which are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), lead researcher Jarrod Welch said:

“We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop.”

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Food Shortages, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Nuclear Power ?

August 14th, 2010

– A decade ago, people (most people) were pretty clear that the big problem with nuclear power is the waste it generates.   And, the wide consensus was that until we solve that problem, using nuclear power is a no-win strategy.  Yes, we get the power now but we have to do something with the waste – and we really have no good idea what to do with it other than burying it.

– It takes over 10,000 years to begin to cool down.   Essentially, we are burying extremely dangerous stuff that we can only hope does not impact those living here in thousands of years.   I, personally, don’t think we have that right – to put them at great risk.

– If humanity had faced up to its impending energy problems a decade or two ago, we might have had time to build out alternative energy systems to replace oils and gases.   But, we went into denial on the entire issues and now we’re drawing close to the time when the lights really are going to go off if we don’t take action.

– In short, we’ve driven ourselves into the fatal corner wherein nuclear power is the only real option we have – other than letting the light go off.   That’s pretty short term thinking and, unfortunately, those living here on Earth many thousands of years from now, may have to pay a terrible price for our thoughtlessness.

– Here are two stories about nuclear power as it is evolving in the world today:

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Chris Huhne says new nuclear plants on track for 2018

Italy: ‘No choice but to return to nuclear power‘

Posted in CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, Nuclear Waste, Pollution, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

‘Exorcisms’ performed on Chechen stolen brides

August 14th, 2010

Dozens of cars were parked outside. Crowds thronged the pavement, desperate to get through the metal gates.

In the courtyard women were filling plastic bottles and jerry cans with water blessed by the imam.

As I took off my shoes, I noticed a marble plaque on the wall:

“There is no illness which Allah cannot cure”.

Inside, huddles of families were camped out on sofas.

There were many tearful faces. Men paced up and down. It might have been an ordinary hospital waiting room until a girl started shrieking and contorting.

A man scooped her up and carried her off into a room off the landing.

Spine-chilling yells came from behind the frosted glass door but nobody turned a hair. Gradually they were stifled by incantations from the Koran.

Most of the patients here are young women and many have suffered breakdowns after being forced into marriage. They are brought to be exorcised and turned into Chechen-style Stepford Wives.

The Centre for Islamic Medicine is an imposing red brick mansion near the centre of Grozny.

It was once the headquarters of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev – Russia’s number one enemy and the man who masterminded the school hostage siege in Beslan in 2004.

Like many buildings in the Chechen capital, the centre has been expensively renovated.

Two wars for independence from Russia reduced Grozny to rubble.

– More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, The Perfect Storm, Women's Rights | No Comments »

‘Shaming’ her in-laws costs 19 year old her nose, ears

August 14th, 2010

– This is the sort of story that really makes me angry.   My sense of cross-cultural tolerance just gets run over by my sense of “Let’s just clear the planet of these throwbacks to the 13th century.“

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“When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out,” 19-year-old Bibi Aisha of Afghanistan says with chilling candor.

Her beauty is still stunning and her confidence inspiring. It takes a moment for the barbaric act committed against her to register in your mind and sight.

Wearing her patterned scarf and with roughly painted nails she shares her story.

“It felt like there was cold water in my nose, I opened my eyes and I couldn’t even see because of all the blood,” she remembers.

It was an act of Taliban justice for the crime of shaming her husband’s family.

This story began when Aisha was just 8 years old.

Her father had promised her hand in marriage, along with that of her baby sister’s, to another family in a practice called “baad.”

“Baad” in Pashtunwali, the law of the Pashtuns, is a way to settle a dispute between rival families.

At 16, she was handed over to her husband’s father and 10 brothers, who she claims were all members of the Taliban in Oruzgan province. Aisha didn’t even meet her husband because he was off fighting in Pakistan.

“I spent two years with them and became a prisoner,” she says. (Watch more of the interview with Aisha)

Tortured and abused, she couldn’t take it any longer and decided to run away. Two female neighbors promising to help took her to Kandahar province.

But this was just another act of deception.

When they arrived to Kandahar her female companions tried to sell Aisha to another man.

All three women were stopped by the police and imprisoned. Aisha was locked up because she was a runaway. And although running away is not a crime, in places throughout Afghanistan it is treated as one if you are a woman.

A three-year sentence was reduced to five months when President Hamid Karzai pardoned Aisha. But eventually her father-in-law found her and took her back home.

That was the first time she met her husband. He came home from Pakistan to take her to Taliban court for dishonoring his family and bringing them shame.

The court ruled that her nose and ears must be cut off. An act carried out by her husband in the mountains of Oruzgan where they left her to die.

But she survived.

And with the help of an American Provincial Reconstruction Team in Oruzgan and the organization Women for Afghan Women (WAW), she is finally getting the help and protection she needs.

Offers have been pouring in to help Aisha, but there are many more women suffering in silence.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Religion - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm, Women's Rights | No Comments »

Using idle computer time

August 14th, 2010

A lot of today’s computer systems have two and even four processors.   That’s a lot of computing power going to waste that could be doing useful work for someone.

It turns out that there are ways to use this extra computing power.   I’ve been doing it for a decade.  First with the SETI people and then later with the BOINC group.

The other day, one of the programs I contribute computing time to discovered a new and very strange Pulsar.  ➡ and ➡

Volunteering your spare computer time doesn’t cost you anything and it might lead to new scientific discoveries, medical cures and who knows what.

Check it out.

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different, CounterCurrents, Science | No Comments »

Math whiz tackles the big carbon sink puzzle

August 3rd, 2010

Spotlight: Inez Fung, University of California at Berkeley

Inez Fung is on a mission to find and account for every gram of heat-trapping carbon dioxide on the planet. And she knows where most of it is hiding.

Fung is the director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment at the University of California-Berkeley. Her work has led to a more complete understanding of the current and future role played by Earth’s so-called “carbon sinks” — features such as oceans and forests that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Fung’s research shows that when the role of these carbon-absorbing mechanisms is taken fully into account, global warming is likely to accelerate even faster than scientists previously believed.

– More… ➡

– Research thanks to LA

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

UN declares water, sanitation ‘human right’

July 31st, 2010

The UN General Assembly has declared access to clean water and sanitation a “human right”.

However, more than 40 countries including the United States failed to support the resolution.

The resolution adopted by the 192-member world body expresses deep concern that an estimated 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water and more than 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.

The non-binding vote was 122-0 with 41 abstentions, including the United States, and many Western nations though Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain and Norway supported it.

UN anti-poverty goals call for the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation to be cut in half by 2015.

– To the original… ➡

– List of the countries who voted for it (122) or abstained from voting(41).  No country voted against it:

In favour:  Afghanistan, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Finland, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tunisia, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zimbabwe.

Abstain:  Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Ethiopia, Greece, Guyana, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Lesotho, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, United States, Zambia.

Posted in CounterCurrents, Human Rights, Politics - The Right Way, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

UK spending cuts to bring years of pain – Cameron

July 31st, 2010

George Osborne will today take the first steps towards the heaviest cuts in public spending in modern British political history.

The Chancellor is to set out the timetable for a spending review which is expected to result in tens of billions of pounds being slashed from Whitehall budgets in the autumn.

The extent of the financial squeeze will be underlined by David Cameron, in a warning of “painful times” ahead. But the Prime Minister will insist that the Government cannot duck difficult decisions over reducing the £156 billion ($339 billion) budget deficit.

Osborne and his Liberal Democrat deputy, Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will promise the review will lead to a “revolution” in public services – and insist frontline services will not be affected.

But the coalition Government’s words will be seen as a barely coded warning the state will have to withdraw from areas regarded as non-essential – with big job losses likely.

– More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Faking it as a foreign executive in China

July 31st, 2010

– Wow.   Talk about all hat and no cattle.   This really made me laugh.

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As China’s rapid development continues, some companies are hiring Westerners to pose as executives in order to secure more business.

Journalist Mitch Moxley worked as “quality control expert”

Canadian journalist Mitch Moxley told the BBC World Service he was among a group of white North Americans hired by a Chinese company as “quality control experts”.

The group pretended to represent a California-based firm in partnership with a Chinese company which had won a contract to develop a production site in Dongying, Shandong province.

“We were a fictional American company that was supposedly spearheading this project,” said Mr Moxley.

They were given leaflets and brochures of an American company for their presentations. But there was no such company.

“I searched high and low on the internet and couldn’t find any existence of it,” he said.

– more… ➡

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different | No Comments »

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