Pelicans, Back From Brink of Extinction, Face Oil Threat
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF and LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: June 4, 2010
FORT JACKSON, La. – For more than a decade, the hundreds of brown pelicans that nested among the mangrove shrubs on Queen Bess Island west of here were living proof that a species brought to the edge of extinction could come back and thrive.
The island was one of three sites in Louisiana where the large, long-billed birds were reintroduced after pesticides wiped them out in the state in the 1960s.But on Thursday, 29 of the birds, their feathers so coated in thick brown sludge that their natural white and gray markings were totally obscured, were airlifted to a bird rehabilitation center in Fort Jackson, the latest victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Another dozen were taken to other rescue centers.
British Columbia’s New Vine Trail
JOURNEYS
By SARA DICKERMAN
LAST October, my husband and I packed the kids in the car and drove north 300 miles from Seattle to western Canada’s key wine country, the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.
Perhaps it was capricious to combine the family road trip with that most couple-y of activities, wine travel. But why not? We like our children. We like wine. If the tasting-room pressure to buy were to become too intense, our son and daughter (at the time almost 5 and 18 months, respectively) could be our out. And to ease the journey, my husband and I brought along a secret weapon: my mother.
USA
Gulf oil spill could push Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe to the point of no return
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 5, 2010
POINTE-AUX-CHENES, LA. — The best thing about this place — where the dry land of south Louisiana gives up, and marshes and bayous stretch away to the Gulf — used to be that white people had so much trouble finding it. Here, a French-speaking Indian tribe has lived for more than a century, isolated from a world that had proved itself unfriendly.But the oil found its refuge in a month and a day.Now, this tribe is feeling an especially sharp version of Louisiana’s despair. Its members worry that the oil will kill the marsh, and seethe at the idea that a bitter history now seems to be getting worse.
Ramping up praise for Arizona crackdown
They hold fewer events with lower turnout than the large protests against SB 1070, but supporters contend that the law targeting illegal immigrants is the will of the people.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times
June 5, 2010
Reporting from Tempe, Ariz. – Tina McClendon was finally surrounded by her own people.The 39-year-old postal worker stood in a minor league baseball stadium here last week with thousands of others who backed Arizona’s new immigration law.
McClendon sported a T-shirt that read “Arizona: Doing the Job the Feds Won’t Do!” It’s one of four similarly-themed shirts she wears regularly. Her sartorial choices earn her frequent compliments from strangers – not a surprise, as polls consistently show large majorities backing the state’s crackdown against illegal immigration.
Europe
Vote on border dispute leaves Slovenes divided
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Ljubljana Saturday, 5 June 2010
Nestled on the Slovenian coast, the town of Koper with its winding cobbled streets, Venetian mansions and Gothic cathedral, is a picturesque and unassuming place. But it is at the centre of a battle raging in the Balkans, which could bring down Slovenia’s government and sour already prickly relations with Croatia.The dispute over the maritime border between the two states dates back to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when both countries laid claim to the Bay of Piran, a seven-square-mile expanse of the Adriatic Sea. Croatia wants the border to remain as it is, down the middle of the bay and touching Italian waters, but Slovenia – which is almost landlocked – says this continuously impedes its ships from gaining direct access to the high seas.
How Rudolph Hess was persuaded to reveal Nazi secrets
From The Times
June 5, 2010
Roger Boyes, Berlin
Rudolf Hess, sunken-eyed deputy to Adolf Hitler, was perhaps the most enigmatic figure to emerge from the Second World War. He was a prisoner from the moment he parachuted into a Scottish field in May 1941 but for more than four decades disclosed almost nothing about his strange flight from the Third Reich.Now the veteran Australian reporter Desmond Zwar has revealed how he helped to extract information from the Nazi while he was locked up alone in Spandau prison, West Berlin. Although the huge, red-brick, 19th-century jail was under the strict control of the Allies – the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union – Mr Zwar managed to conduct a bizarre conversation stretching over several years with Hess.
Middle East
Gaza Flotilla: protesters’ story
They have been shot at, imprisoned, deported and threatened – what makes somebody prepared to risk their lives to go into the occupied territories?
Emine Saner
The Guardian, Saturday 5 June 2010
As the British activists aboard the aid flotilla to Gaza return to the UK, it becomes clear that the majority of them are people who have devoted years to campaigning against the Israeli occupation. They have been shot at, imprisoned, deported and threatened over the years and still they go back. What makes somebody prepared to risk their lives to go into the occupied territories? Ewa Jasiewicz, an activist and journalist, had been involved in anti-capitalist and social justice campaigns in Britain when friends returned from the West Bank where they had been volunteers with the newly formed International Solidarity Movement in 2002. “They said it was something that everyone should do, because you could prevent someone getting killed or injured,” she says, on the phone from Istanbul, where she had been deported after being arrested along with the other activists on the aid flotilla to Gaza.
Film about Iranian protest victim Neda Agha-Soltan beats regime’s censors
Jamming and power cuts fail to prevent documentary going viral
Ian Black, Middle East editor
Iran is jamming satellite broadcasts in attempts to stop people seeing a new film telling the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot dead during the mass protests that followed last summer’s disputed presidential election.Viewers in Tehran complained of jamming and power cuts on Wednesday and yesterday when the Voice of America Persian TV network broadcast the documentary For Neda, featuring the first film interviews with the family of the 27-year-old.
Asia
The ‘Bullet Magnet’, Mick Flynn, recalls a firefight with the Taleban in 2006
From The Times
June 5, 2010
The Times
If the crossing turned out to be as dangerous as it looked, it was better if I led from the front. I always get a buzz out of going first.There wasn’t even a squeak of birdsong. The silence was setting off all my alarm bells. In a war zone, a close, brooding silence like the one we had now is a strong combat indicator. It means the locals have cleared out. All my instincts and training told me we were taking an almighty risk.
The radio crackled to life in my headset for the umpteenth time: “Make all speed for Musa Qala. Push on, push on!” That settled it. “OK, Leechy,” I said to my driver, James Leech, “take us up to the entrance.”
Cheonan credibility gap widens
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL – The sinking of the Cheonan – or rather the result of the explosion that sank the South Korean corvette on March 26 – is proving a tough sell for South Korea’s conservative leaders.So many theories are floating around about how it happened that it’s beginning to seem possible nothing happened at all, that the ship never exploded, that the two great pieces they hauled up from the Yellow Sea were all cardboard fabrications like North Korean satellites. And the torpedo they dredged up? In this industrialized society, couldn’t someone have twisted and painted that thing to look ugly and bent and rusted in any body shop?
Africa
Soccer slums: The truth about African football
African football is in the spotlight as the World Cup kicks off in Johannesburg this week. But the truth about the game in the slums and shanty towns of the poorest continent is not as the marketing men would have you believe
Report by Daniel Howden Saturday, 5 June 2010
It wasn’t a big game by local standards. St John’s versus the National Youth Congress in a friendly. It didn’t even merit a mention on the chalkboards of the nearby video shacks – the barometer of status in the football-mad slums of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and East Africa’s most populous city.The climax of La Liga (football league) in Spain had top billing at Stamford Bridge – not the opulent west-London home of Chelsea FC but a one-room hut with a television, a tin roof and exposed wiring in the deprived and dangerous Korogocho slum.
Egypt, Sudan lock horns with lower Africa over control of Nile River
A colonial era agreement gives Egypt and Sudan rights over all water in the world’s longest river. But a population boom in the Nile River’s basin has other Africa countries clamoring for more access.
By Mike Pflanz, Correspondent / June 4, 2010
Nairobi, Kenya
A war of words over control of the Nile has broken out between Egypt, which sees the river as its lifeblood, and countries upstream complaining they are denied a fair share of the river’s water.
Presidents and officials from half a dozen countries have been crisscrossing Africa holding talks in the latest escalation of a decades-old dispute.At its heart lies a 1929 accord, signed during Britain’s colonial rule in Africa, which gives Egypt and Sudan rights over all the water in the world’s longest river.
The Nile Waters Agreement, which still holds today, guarantees Egypt 55.5 billion cubic meters of the Nile’s 84 billion total flow. Sudan gets the rest.