New species of Arabian freshwater fish discovered in Oman
27/05/2009 09:17:15
GARRA SMARTI – Species named after local UAE PHD student, Emma Smart
May 2009. A new species of Arabian freshwater fish, Garra smarti, has been discovered in Southern Oman by Emma Smart, a UAE-based PHD student and member of the Emirates Wildlife Society – WWF (EWS-WWF) team. To date there are only sixteen recorded species of primary freshwater fish throughout the entire Arabian Peninsula, highlighting the importance of the discovery and underpinning the unique and high ecological value of Arabian wadi ecosystems.
Wadi Wuraya
Smart is currently involved in EWS-WWF’s Wadi Wuraya project where she is studying the ecology of another species of related freshwater fish, Garra barremiae, which is endemic to the UAE Mountains. “So little has been studied regarding freshwater ecosystems of the UAE and Arabian Peninsula as a whole and I hope to learn a great deal about the ecology of these fascinating habitats and their wildlife,” concluded Smart.
“This is an extremely exciting discovery and I am thrilled that my project and research has lead to uncovering this species,” added Smart. “The find proves how little we know about the region and how much potential wildlife remains to be discovered. In order to conserve the natural ecosystem in the region it is vital that we continue to learn more about them and the species that reside in them. I plan to continue my research across the region which may lead to further discoveries in the future.
Italian workers took industrial action on Wednesday to back their demands for stronger health and safety regulations after three workers died at a Sardinian refinery.
Three thousand workers at the Saras SpA refining company near Cagliari walked out for eight hours following the incident, in which the three men apparently succumbed to toxic fumes.
One of the three men reported feeling ill on Tuesday afternoon after entering a cistern that had been idled for maintenance.
A second went in to help him, then a third, all of whom collapsed and died. A fourth worker was hospitalised.
First of all, my condolences to all the families and friends of those workers who died so horribly.
Saras considers health and safety in working places as a key value, and ensures the protection of its staff in the operation of its everyday production activities.
Now, we know what these “ensurances” are worth … probably the same as the toilet paper which the corporate fat cats wipe their fat asses with … In capitalism, profits often count more than safety measures which … shock horror! .. would maybe reduce profits.
Britain: A campaign group for the families of those killed at work have dismissed a much-heralded Health and Safety Executive strategy on the issue as no more than lip-service: here.
A negligent builder is facing prison after admitting the manslaughter of a 15-year-old who was working as a labourer, here.
The International Metalworkers’ Federation has joined a global campaign calling on G20 heads of state to protect workers in one of the world’s most dangerous industries – shipbreaking: here.
BT boss ‘rewarded for failure’ with ‘outrageous’ £3m payout
Wednesday 27 May 2009
The Communication Workers Union condemned a £3 million payout to the boss who presided over the company’s disastrous losses and job cuts as “outrageous” on Wednesday.
Francois Barrault headed the BT division handling telecoms networks for major organisations – ranging from consumer goods giant Unilever to the NHS – before stepping down last October.
Mr Barrault received a total of £2.85 million, including a £1.6m termination payment, according to firm’s annual report.
He also gained £573,000 in salary and pension contributions up until the end of November when he left and £684,000 in other benefits, including a retention payout and allowances for housing, school fees and social clubs.
BT has been forced to write off more than £2 billion in over-optimistic assumptions on contracts and restructuring charges at the global services arm, after an “unacceptable” performance.
CWU deputy general secretary Andy Kerr said: “Mr Barrault’s pay-off is outrageous. He is being rewarded for failure.
“This gives the wrong signal to staff at a time when they are being asked to make significant changes to the way they work.
“BT must look at the big picture when it comes to remuneration. All BT staff deserve a share in company success, not just those at the top.”
Britain: Hundreds of workers responsible for producing dozens of household-name products picketed Unilever’s AGM today against its “greedy attack” on their pensions: here.
The Home Office has come under fire as allegations have emerged that an African national was so badly beaten by guards during an attempted deportation this month that he required hospital treatment.
The shocking claims have raised further questions over the abuse of asylum-seekers in detention and the Home Office’s deportation protocols.
The man, who cannot be identified for fear of reprisals, is alleged to have suffered vicious beatings as the authorities attempted to deport him from Britain to his native country via France.
He was left bleeding and battered to such a severe degree at the hands of G4S – formerly Group 4 – security guards that a French pilot refused to allow him on the flight which would have returned him to Africa, supporters claim.
As a result, the man has now been returned to detention in Britain, where it is feared that there will be yet another attempt to deport him.
The allegations, made to the Morning Star by anti-deportation campaigners on Wednesday, add to a litany of cases in which detainees, overwhelmingly of African origin, have suffered racist and physical abuse at the hands of state-sanctioned private security personnel.
So grave is the problem that campaigning group Medical Justice compiled a report on the issue – Outsourcing Abuse – which was published last year. The report documented over 300 cases where abuse was alleged, often at the hands of security firms operating government contracts for the “escort” and removal of deportees.
Summarising its findings, Medical Justice stated: “While the practice of using private companies for running detention centres and escorting of forced removals may contribute to a certain level of ‘see no evil, hear no evil,’ our understanding is that the Home Office is aware of an unacceptable level of alleged abuse through its own complaints procedure.
“We consider the evidence in this report reveals what may amount to state-sanctioned violence, for which ultimate responsibility lies with the Home Office.”
In the latest case, the detainee was deported as far as Paris, having been handcuffed, had fingers jammed into his nostrils and been beaten and stamped on by guards. So blatant were his injuries that the Air France pilot refused to take the injured man on the flight.
This also does not appear to be an isolated incident. The report gives one example of abuse as follows: “The officers kicked and punched him and kneed him in the nose. He was then placed in the segregation unit and left naked and without a mattress to sleep on.
“Later that evening, the applicant attempted to kill himself. He was visited by police officers who convinced him to withdraw his complaint. Under duress, the applicant agreed.”
Last November, an investigation was launched into allegations that Cameroonian Anselme Noumbiwa suffered similar brutality. He too was deported to Paris where an Air France pilot refused to fly him to Africa and contacted police over the barbarity of his treatment. …
The Morning Star contacted G4S for comment but, by time of press, it had not replied.
To commemorate those events, this year is “Darwin year”. As part of that, there is an exhibition about Darwin and evolution in the natural history museum. It is called “Expeditie Darwin”.
The central theme of the exhibition is Darwin‘s journey around the world, and the contribution of especially his visit to the Galapagos islands then, to his theory of evolution. Islands, the exhibition says, make for peculiar twists in the evolution of animal (and plant) species. Animals, eg, may evolve into bigger, or smaller species, than their original continental ancestors, depending on presence of predators, food, etc. Today still, scientists, including employees of the museum, discover new facts on evolution, including on islands.
According to the exhibition, the major contribution to evolution theory were the various species of buntings, which Darwin collected on the Galapagos islands. Darwin at first thought they were finches, and they are still known as Darwin’s finches.
This mistake by Darwin was not really unexpected, as Darwin’s major subject at university had been theology, not biology. In fact, then it was hardly possible to major in biology at any university. Some recent authors say that Darwin’s discoveries on Galapagos mockingbirds, or in Argentina, really were more of an influence on evolution theory than the buntings. This view is not discussed in the exhibition.
Darwin’s view that natural selection was the mechanism propelling evolution forward was influenced by another theologian, Thomas Malthus, who had not majored in the subject in which he would become best known; political economy in Malthus‘ case.
Darwin found out that the main differences between the various Galapagos “finch” species were their beaks, adapted to different kinds of food in the island environment. From that, he concluded that the divergence from one continental ancestral species which had arrived on the islands to the present different species had been rather recent. 12 of the 14 Darwin’s finch species are present in the museum collection.
After traveling around the world on the ship Beagle as a twen, and forming the basic principles of his evolution theory during and soon after that journey, Darwin waited until he was fifty with publishing his ideas. Perhaps there was something of another theologian-scholar in him, a literary fictional theologian-scholar: Edward Casaubon from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Casaubon does not want to publish his complex sweeping theories until he would be totally sure that no critic would have a chance of successfully attacking them. Which means defering and defering publication, maybe until the Greek kalends.
In Darwin’s nineteenth century reality, however, there was an additional reason for delaying publication on especially the evolution theory: it could be foreseen that Christian believers in creation (about 6,000 years ago, according to Bishop Usher‘s addition of numbers in the Bible) of immutable species would sharply attack Darwin. Charles Darwin was an irenic person, who did not want trouble, also not with what later would become known as “creationists“, some of which he knew well personally. Eg, his wife, and Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle were very devout.
Like Darwin, Wallace had studied birds on various (Indonesian in his case) islands. He studied especially imperial pigeons: various species, similar to each other, like Darwin’s finches; yet differing according to environment, also like Darwin’s finches. Wallace was from a much poorer family than Darwin. He had less cause than Darwin to be afraid of criticisms from Christian “polite society” if he would publish.
Darwin understood that soon, maybe someone else would get the credit for theories on which he had been working for decades. A potential conflict between Darwin and Wallace was prevented by the presentation of a paper, written jointly by them. Darwin now started working much faster toward publishing the Origin of Species, which came out next year.
At the exhibition are also many other animal species, mainly from islands. Living or extinct (eg, the dodo). There are explanations how scientists of this museum study those animals. One example of that research is the discovery of the jellyfish eating sea anemone (or lake anemone, as it lives in a salt lake) Entacmaea medusivora. It was already known from Palau. Later, a museum researcher found out that it lives in Borneo island as well.
Newly Goat-Free, a Galapagos Island Awaits a Finch Renaissance: here.
A new species of finch may have arisen in the Galapagos: here.
Adaptation and function of the bills of Darwin’s finches: divergence by feeding type and sex: here.
Race, sex and the ‘earthly paradise’: Wallace versus Darwin on human evolution and prospects: here.
A global model for the origin of species independent of geographical isolation: here.
Linnaean taxonomy is still a cornerstone of biology, but modern DNA techniques have erased many of the established boundaries between species. This has made identifying species difficult in practice, which can cause problems, as shown by a researcher from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden: here.
Charles Darwin’s theory of gradual evolution is not supported by geological history, New York University Geologist Michael Rampino concludes in an essay in the journal Historical Biology. In fact, Rampino notes that a more accurate theory of gradual evolution, positing that long periods of evolutionary stability are disrupted by catastrophic mass extinctions of life, was put forth by Scottish horticulturalist Patrick Matthew prior to Darwin’s published work on the topic: here.
SINGAPORE: A number of animals and plants which have survived for many centuries face the threat of extinction. Conservationists are fighting an uphill battle to protect our planet’s heritage and better understand it.
That’s true of the snow grouse, a rare species of bird found in central Japan, that is believed to have survived the Ice Age.
They are found 2,400 metres above sea level. The snow grouse is known in Japanese as Raicho or Thunderbird because they are believed to be active when there’s thunder.
The birds have been seen in the mountains of Tateyama during the April to June period, usually in the early morning or late afternoon.
Out of a population of 3,000 in Japan, 245 snow grouse were spotted in the 1,700 hectare area that makes up Tateyama. However, catching a glimpse of the snow grouse is not that easy. …
Experts said the Japanese species lives for eight to 10 years, twice as long as similar birds in other parts of the world. But there is still a lot more to be known.
According to Wikipedia, these birds are not a separate species, but a subspecies of the ptarmigan which also occurs elsewhere in Eurasia and North America.
SYDNEY: Ancient rock art depicting the extinct marsupial lion has been found in the Kimberly region of Western Australia, says a study in the journal Antiquity.
The first convincing example of a marsupial lion found in rock art to date, the find suggests that early Australians and marsupial lions co-existed.
It also hints at what marsupial lions may have looked like. Painted in red ochre, the image depicts a large four-legged animal, with a strong, prominent front limb poised for action, protruding claws and stripes running the length of its back.
New look at an old beast
The rock art “adds to our knowledge of the animal’s appearance that, without the discovery of a mummified animal, would have remained conjecture,” says the study. “The artist has depicted a tail with tufted tip, the ears are pointed rather than rounded [and] the animal is striped, rather than spotted.”
The marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex) is well known from the fossil record. The first complete skeleton was unearthed in 2002 in a Nullarbor Plain cave by researchers from the Western Australian Museum. From that find, scientists know that Thylacoleo was front heavy, with large, strong forelimbs. They also had vicious claws and razor-sharp teeth, making them ferocious predators.
However, as the species has been extinct for tens of thousands of years (some estimates suggest 30,000 years, but direct dating of the fossils has not been completed), experts don’t know exactly what they looked like. They’re also unsure what drove them extinct and even if they were still around when the first Aborigines arrived on the continent.
Some evidence suggests climate change was to blame, whilst other evidence points to early Australians hunting them and burning the land.
Lion or tiger?
Tour guide and amateur archaeologist Tim Willing found the painting while exploring rock art near the northwestern Kimberly coast in June 2008. He took digital images of the painting and then, along with co-author Kim Akerman, published a description of them in Antiquity earlier this year.
Many Australian cave paintings have been found to depict the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, which is known to have persisted on the mainland until around 2,000 year ago. However, the newly discovered painting has several features that set it apart from others thought to depict thylacines.
The stripes of the animal in the painting are more extensive than those of a thylacine, which cover only the animal’s rear end. The creature also appears to have cat-like claws, a feature of Thylacoleo. Furthermore, the muzzle is blunt, not long and tapered like a Tasmanian tiger’s.
“Compared with the powerful forequarters, the hindquarters appear underdeveloped,” write the authors. “This apparent asymmetry is not seen in rock art images of thylacines, where both hind- and forelimbs are usually of similar dimensions. However thylacoleos were equipped with powerful claws on the hind limbs and these appear to be depicted in this image.”
According to the study, Australian palaeontologists John Long, of Museum Victoria in Melbourne, and Rod Wells, of Flinders University in South Australia, agree that the animal pictured is likely to be Thylacoleo.
However, Steven Wroe, a palaeontologist from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, isn’t convinced. Whilst conceding that the coexistence of marsupial lions and Australian aboriginals would be exciting, he believes the rock art could still be a representation of a thylacine.
Wroe points out that mainland Tasmanian tigers may have had a different pattern of stripes than the isolated Tasmanian population. “The fact that it has stripes at all, that are in any way similar to the Tasmanian tiger, suggests to me that it is a Tasmanian tiger” he told Cosmos Online.
Aboriginal rock paintings on Cape York fade away: here.
Archaeologists document rock art sites in Australia by helicopter: here.
April 2011: A massive section part of the Nullarbor in South Australia is being declared a Wilderness Protection Area, giving the unique parcel of land the highest level of environmental protection: here.
Did dingo attacks drive the Tassie tiger extinct? Here.
Isolation Doomed the Tasmanian Tiger. The Tasmanian devil could suffer the same fate as their homeland cousin — the extinct Tasmanian tiger: here.
This is a video about Barack Obama, before he became United States president, having the courage to oppose George W. Bush on the Iraq war (yes, if one compares Obama to his politician colleagues, including some Democrats, not to rank and file peace activists, then it was courage).
Now that Obama is president, having much more power than then: will he have the courage to oppose the Pentagon people who want to continue Bush’s Iraq war for a decade or longer? I am not really sure.
The Pentagon is prepared to remain in Iraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between Washington and Baghdad that would bring all American troops home by 2012, according to the US army chief of staff.
By Alex Spillius and agencies in Washington
Last Updated: 7:49AM BST 27 May 2009
…
The US currently has about 139,000 troops in Iraq and 52,000 in Afghanistan, with a further 16,000 to arrive by the end of this year.
MoveOn Remains Silent on Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; by Tom Hayden, AlterNet: here. War in Pakistan: here.
Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region officially started pumping crude oil to the world market on Monday under deals that Baghdad describes as illegal: here.
Unemployment in Britain has topped 2 million and is expected to rise to 3 million by the end of the year as job losses hit all sections of the economy: here.
Since the beginning of 2009, activity in French ports has undergone a substantial slowdown linked to the world economic crisis: here.
Michael Moore’s new documentary, focusing on the current worldwide economic crisis, is slated for an October 2 release — which will be exactly one year and a day since the U.S. Senate approved a $700 billion bailout of a sinking Wall Street: here.
Afghan was taken to Guantanamo aged 12-rights group
Tue May 26, 2009
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL – An Afghan who has spent over six years at the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay prison was only around 12 years old when he was detained, not 16 or 17 as his official record says, an Afghan rights group said on Tuesday.
Interviews with the family of Mohammed Jawad, who like many poor Afghans does not know his exact age or birthday, showed he was probably not even a teenager when he was arrested in 2002, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said. …
Afghan human rights commissioner Nader Nadery said in addition to being a minor at the time of his detention, Jawad was tortured and abused by the Afghan police and while at the Guantanamo detention center.
The Commission is seeking his release and repatriation, and in the course of looking into his case found out he was probably considerably younger than his records showed.
‘TORTURED AND ABUSED’
“We asked his mother what was the big event close to his birth that you can remember, any change in the president etcetera, and she said that he was born around six months after his father’s death,” Nadery told Reuters.
“We tried to explore more when his father died, and his father died in a battle in Khost,” he said.
That fighting was in 1991, according to a petition submitted to the Afghan supreme court this month on Jawad’s behalf, aiming to force President Hamid Karzai to seek his release.
Nadry said the commission checked Jawad’s mother’s story, interviewing other relatives and officials including a soldier who commanded Jawad’s father.
Major Eric Montalvo, a Pentagon-appointed U.S. Marine Corps lawyer representing Jawad, said his client — who may still be a teenager if his mother’s dates are correct — should be released.
“We have a child of Afghanistan that was wrongfully taken from this country and he needs to be returned. He was tortured, he was abused over seven years of custody,” he told a news conference in the Afghan capital.
Nadry said the commission had raised Jawad’s case with the Afghan and U.S. governments in the past, without success.
Talking about torture: A 14-year military interrogator has undercut one of the key arguments posited by Vice President Dick Cheney in favor of the Bush Administration’s torture techniques and alleged that the use of torture has cost “hundreds if not thousands” of American lives: here.
The home secretary Jacqui Smith faces legal action over allegations that MI5 agents colluded in the torture of a British former civil servant by Bangladeshi intelligence officers.
Lawyers for the British man, Jamil Rahman, are to file a damages claim alleging that Smith was complicit in assault, unlawful arrest, false imprisonment and breaches of human rights legislation over his alleged ill-treatment while detained in Bangladesh.
The claims bring to three the number of countries in which British intelligence agents have been accused of colluding in the torture of UK nationals. Rahman says that he was the victim of repeated beatings over a period of more than two years at the hands of Bangladeshi intelligence officers, and he claims that a pair of MI5 officers were blatantly involved in his ordeal.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called on Wednesday for a full and transparent investigation into the recent death of a Yemeni national held at the US prison camp on Guantanamo Bay: here.
Canada’s Conservative government has repeatedly introduced obstacles to Abousfian Abdelrazik returning home, in the process redefining the rights of Canadian citizenship and inadvertently raising questions about Canada’s complicity in torture: here.
Death at Guantanamo Hovers Over Obama’s Middle East Visit: here.
From Wildlife Extra:
