Police Fire on South African Protests

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
21:56 Mecca time, 18:56 GMT

Police fire on S African protests

Police clashed with protesters in several towns where residents have complained of poor living conditions

South African police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators protesting against poor living conditions during a rally in the country’s northeast.

Riot police opened fire on Tuesday to disperse protesters who had torched a municipal office in the eastern town of Belfast, the Associated Press news agency said, quoting Captain Leonard Hlathi, a police spokesman.

Two police officers were injured by stone-throwing demonstrators, the spokesman said.

Police also clashed with demonstrators in several other northeastern towns, where protesters are calling for better sanitation, electricity and housing in impoverished townships.

In the town of Standerton, southeast of Johannesburg, burnt tyres and rubbish filled the streets, and several people were reported injured in the protest.

Meanwhile, towns and shops were closed after thousands marched on the municipal offices in the nearby township of Sakhile.

Pressure on Zuma

The six-month-old government of Jacob Zuma, the country’s president, is under pressure to deliver on campaign promises and improve basic services such as water and electricity in South Africa.

Zuma has promised to ease inequalities in the country, but he has said the government has fallen short in meeting demands for better basic services.

His government has set up a special hotline to deal with complaints, but a spokesman for the president says he will not meet protesters.

But Sipho Seepe, a political columnist writing with the Mail and Guardian newspaper, said the people are not angry at Zuma.

“They are angry at the local officials,” Sepe told Al Jazeera.

“So we must not give the impression that this is a revolt against the government of Jacob Zuma.

‘Heightened expectations’

“What we have are more heightened expectations that came as a result of the last elections that we had. The protests are taking place at the local level,” Sepe said.

“What the people see is that the local government officials represent the past regime, a regime that was arrogant and aloof. They do not see these leaders at the local level as part of the new regime.”

However, Hassan Isilow, a journalist in Cape Town, said Zuma should not have made such promises for easing the economic inequalities in the country.

“Regrettably the president has not delivered on any of these promises,” Isilow told Al Jazeera.

“The problem is the country is grappling with a recession, but the local people want a better living condition regardless of the economic situation of the country,” he said.

“People have argued that the country has a lot of resources … but there’s a high level of corruption within the ruling ANC where top officials within the government and the municipalities have misappropriated funds.

“The local people believe that, had it not been for corruption, then service delivery would not have been a problem.”

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Wolf quota eyed after 9 shot near Yellowstone

Wildlife officials in Montana will consider changes to the state’s inaugural wolf hunt after nine of the predators were shot in just three weeks along the border of Yellowstone National Park.

More than 1,300 gray wolves were removed from the endangered species list in Idaho and Montana this spring following a costly federal restoration effort.

Hunting has been promoted as a way to keep the population of the fast-breeding species in check and reduce wolf attacks on livestock. Hunters in the two states have killed at least 48 wolves since Sept. 1.

However, all but two of the 11 wolves killed in Montana came from a small portion of the Absaroka (ab-SOHR’-ka)-Beartooth Wilderness, along the northern border of Yellowstone. And at least four were from Yellowstone’s Cottonwood Pack, including the group’s breeding female.

Concerned about the heavily concentrated killing, state wildlife commissioners last week suspended hunting in the area.

On Tuesday, commissioners will consider a range of additional responses, from reallocating the season quota of 75 wolves to shutting down the hunting season in part of the state.

“We’ve missed the mark a little this first year,” said Carolyn Sime, lead wolf biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Shooting a wolf, particularly in some of the sparsely vegetated terrain around Yellowstone, proved easier than expected, she said.

The Absaroka-Beartooth was one of two remote “backcountry” areas of Montana where wolf hunting was allowed before the statewide season opening, set for Oct. 25.

Grazing is generally not allowed in the backcountry. That means the harvest of wolves there gives little help to ranchers suffering losses from wolf attacks. In addition, critics said the shootings could choke off the flow of young wolves leaving Yellowstone to establish packs outside the park.

“Yellowstone can’t be a source for wolves to colonize other areas if they get blown away right at the boundary,” said Norman Bishop, a former Yellowstone park ranger now on the board of the Wolf Recovery Foundation, an Idaho-based advocacy group.

Sime said that with wolves firmly established in many areas of Montana, Yellowstone’s importance as a source of wolves had diminished.

There were 89 packs in Montana at the end of 2008, including 18 in the part of the state that borders Yellowstone.

“From a biological perspective, it’s a non-issue,” Sime said, noting the death of nine wolves was unlikely to hurt the overall population.

Environmentalists countered that the concentrated shootings in the Absaroka-Beartooth area showed the Idaho and Montana hunts were too hastily planned. They also decried the loss of wolves from the park, a wildlife haven where hunting is not allowed.

Yellowstone was one of two areas where the animals were reintroduced beginning in 1995 after being absent across most of the Northern Rockies for decades.

In Idaho, which has about 800 wolves, wildlife officials said their hunt has gone more smoothly. Thirty-seven wolves had been killed in Idaho through Sunday, with the harvest spread across 11 of the state’s 12 wolf-hunting zones.

Idaho has a quota of 220 wolves. Like Montana, the state also had an early season opening in some areas, although none bordering Yellowstone.

Bob Ream, a Montana wildlife commissioner from Helena who spent more than 20 years researching wolves, said in hindsight it was unwise for Montana to allow so many wolves to be killed on land adjacent to the park.

But because wolves breed so prolifically, expanding their numbers by as much as 30 percent a year, he said any harm done would be temporary.

“There’s plenty of wolves to fill in for those nine, either from the park or other parts of the Absaroka-Beartooth,” Ream said.

Any decision from commissioners on Tuesday will be set against the backdrop of a federal lawsuit that is challenging the removal of wolves from the endangered species list.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy last month allowed the hunting seasons in Idaho and Montana to go forward, rejecting an injunction requested by environmentalists. But Molloy also said the environmentalists were likely to ultimately prevail, leaving future hunts in doubt.

Source:
Associated Press, “Wolf quota eyed after 9 shot near Yellowstone“, accessed October 12, 2009

United Nations Human Rights Council Agrees to Session on the GoldstoneReport

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
21:05 Mecca time, 18:05 GMT

UN agrees to ‘Goldstone session’

Netanyahu has lashed out against the Goldstone report, which he called ‘distorted’

The UN Human Rights Council will hold a special session in Geneva, as requested by the Palestinian Authority, in which the Goldstone report is expected to be addressed, Al Jazeera has learnt.

The session will begin on Thursday and is expected to last into the following day.

The request by the Palestinian Authority (PA) is co-sponsored by the 18 member states of the human rights council.

Those members are: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Senegal.

The meeting will be the 12th special session of the council, following the Security Council’s open debate on the Middle East expected in New York on Wednesday.

Policy change

The Palestinians have pressed for a vote on the report at the UN Human Rights Council, effectively a policy reverse by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, whose government had earlier agreed to delay the vote for six months.

That decision, apparently made under US pressure, sparked sharp criticism and protests across Palestinian society.

Should a vote takes place by the council, the matter could be referred to higher UN bodies that could, in theory, push for a war-crimes prosecution.

The news of the UN special session comes a day after Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, lashed out against the Goldstone report, which criticises Israel for deliberately targeting civilians during its war on Gaza earlier this year.

He called the report, compiled by a team led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, a “distorted report, written by this distorted committee”.

“This report encourages terrorism and threatens peace,” he said, and announced that he would never allow any of the country’s leaders or soldiers to be put on trial for war crimes.

Disproportionate force

The Goldstone report accuses Israel of using disproportionate force, deliberately targeting civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure during a three-week offensive against Hamas from December to January.

The report, which focused primarily on the actions of Israel, also accused Hamas of war crimes by deliberately targeting civilians and trying to spread terror with rocket attacks.

Israeli officials across the board have condemned the report, saying their country had little choice but to respond to those rockets.

They also blame Hamas for civilian casualties in Gaza, saying fighters from the Palestinian faction which has de facto control of the territory, took cover in residential areas during the war.

But Goldstone’s strong credentials as a respected jurist, his Jewish faith and past support for Israeli causes have made it hard for Israel to dismiss the claims.

About 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died as a result of the 22-day Gaza conflict which lasted from December into January.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Beware of the Sea Blob

As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says. And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant.

Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season’s warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs. (Mediterranean map).

Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too—and lasting for months.

Until now, the light-brown “mucus” was seen as mostly a nuisance, clogging fishing nets and covering swimmers with a sticky gel—newspapers from the 1800s show beach-goers holding their noses, according to study leader Roberto Danovaro, director of the marine science department at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy.

But the new study found that Mediterranean mucilages harbor bacteria and viruses, including potentially deadly E. coli, Danovaro said. Those pathogens threaten human swimmers as well as fish and other sea creatures, according to the report, published September 16 in the journal PloS One.

Blobs Born of “Marine Snow”

A mucilage begins as “marine snow”: clusters of mostly microscopic dead and living organic matter, including some life-forms visible to the naked eye—small crustaceans such as shrimp and copepods, for example.

Over time, the snow picks up other tiny hitchhikers, looking for a meal or safety in numbers, and may grow into a mucilage.

The blobs were first identified in 1729 in the Mediterranean, where they’re most often seen. The sea’s relative stillness and shallowness make the water column more stable, providing ideal conditions for mucilage formation.

For the new study, Danovaro and colleagues studied historical reports of mucilage in the Mediterranean from 1950 to 2008. Outbreaks, they discovered, were more likely when sea-surface temperatures were warmer than average.

In 1991, Italian marine biologist Serena Fonda Umani swam alongside a mucilage—the mass is too dense to swim inside—in the Adriatic Sea, an arm of the Mediterranean. (Adriatic Sea map).

She remembers diving about 50 feet (15 meters) down when she got the sensation of a ghost floating over her—”sort of an alien experience.”

Umani, a co-author of the new study with Danovaro and Antonio Pusceddu, of the Polytechnic University of Marche, has also dived into marine snow—the mucilage’s precursor.

She described it like swimming through a sugar solution. Out of the water, the dried “sugar” stiffened her hair and stuck to her wetsuit.

“The suit was impossible to wash totally, because it was covered by a layer of greenish slime,” said Umani, of Italy’s University of Trieste. “It was a nightmare.”

Few people would purposely swim into a mucilage, said Farooq Azam, a marine microbiologist at the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“If you were not familiar with this—and especially if you were familiar—you wouldn’t want to go near it,” said Azam, who was not involved in the new study.

A giant odiferous blob drifting offshore is “certainly not the seascape that one goes to the beach [for],” Azam added.

Public Health Hazard

Eager to see if the blobs’ side effects extend beyond ruined wetsuits, Umani and colleagues sampled coastal waters and mucilage from the Adriatic in 2007. The warm, shallow sea is like a “big bathtub,” Scripps’s Azam said—an ideal natural laboratory for studying the blobs.

The study team discovered that the blobs are hot spots for viruses and bacteria, including the deadly E. coli. Coastal communities regularly test for E. coli, and its presence is enough to close beaches to swimming.

Study leader Donavaro said, “Now we see that … the release of pathogens from the mucilage can be potentially problematic” for human health.

People who swim through mucilage can also develop skin conditions such as dermatitis, he added.

Suffocated by Blobs

Fish and other marine animals that have no choice but to swim with mucilages are most vulnerable to their disease-carrying bacteria, which can kill even large fish, the study says.

The noxious masses can also trap animals, coating their gills and suffocating them, Danovaro said. And the biggest blobs can sink to the bottom, acting like a huge blanket that smothers life on the seafloor.

Mucilages Going Global?

Mucilages aren’t a concern for just the Mediterranean, Danovaro added. Recent studies tentatively suggest that mucus may be spreading throughout oceans from the North Sea (map) to Australia, perhaps because of rising temperatures, he said.

“It’s a good example [of what will happen if] we don’t do something to stop climate warming,” Danovaro said. “There are consequences [if] we continue to deny the scientific evidence.”

Beyond warm temperatures, it’s still not exactly clear what drives the blobs’ formation, Scripps’ Azam pointed out. For instance, no one knows why the dead marine matter in the blobs doesn’t decompose.

“It’s important we do find out” what’s driving the rise of the blobs, Azam said, “for the sake of the rest of the worlds’ oceans.”