Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began, Putin-watchers have become increasingly concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin might use nuclear weapons. For example, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen — author of an insightful Putin biography — has suggested that Russia may use tactical nuclear weapons against a military target in Poland. American-British financier Bill Browder — who has suffered at Putin’s hand — has even argued in recent days that “it’s probable” that Putin will use nukes.
I share Gessen’s and Browder’s concerns. But why would Putin — the world’s most consequential oligarch — use nukes? Four main arguments have been made so far.
First, and increasingly popular amongst Ukrainians and Americans, is the argument that Putin is evil…
The war in Ukraine massively intensified during its eighth week. Ukraine sank Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea, Russia launched a new phase of the war with a concerted bid to take over the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and the United States began to ship heavy artillery to Ukraine.
This military escalation stood in contrast to the lack of diplomatic or economic developments. Russian-Ukrainian talks have stalled and the West has stopped escalating sanctions, instead shipping more weapons to Ukraine.
“This morning, almost along the whole front line of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, the occupiers attempted to break through our defences,” said Oleksiy Davilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told Ukrainian media on April 18. “Fortunately our military is holding out. They passed through only…
CASPER, Wyo. — A family pet will likely lose part of its leg after coming into contact with an illegally set trap in Evansville.
According to a social media post by the Evansville Police Department, the cat was missing for two days before being returned with a trap attached to its leg.
The incident happened on the east side near Williams Street, the post said.
“These traps are illegal in town as they can cause significant damage to animals and humans who get snared by them,” the EPD said, adding that citizens should be aware of the traps.
In an email to Oil City News, Evansville Chief of Police Mike Thompson said the type of trap was a foothold spring trap with 4-inch…
Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Department announced Monday that a Plain Dealing man who has been terrorizing Bossier Parish for over 15 years has pled guilty to terroristic acts.
“It does not matter how long it takes, if there is an unsolved case we will pursue it until the guilty person is caught,” Bossier Sheriff Julian Whittington said.
Gary Lee Wilson, 58, was arrested on Feb. 26, 2018, for crimes that date back over 15 years.
Through the investigation detectiveswith the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Department discovered that Wilson was responsible forvandalizing property, burningdeer standsand deer camps.
Wilson also placed metal spikes on trails to cripple horses and on roads to flatten tires.
On one occasion, Wilson attempted to lure deputies into a trap by covering an old, abandoned water well.
Leah Shaffer picks up Gertie, her 1-year-old Barred Rock chicken, on April 4, outside of her home in St. Charles. Shaffer purchased four chickens to care for at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
In fall 2020, Leah Shaffer ordered four chickens from a Missouri hatchery — a pandemic impulse purchase to get her two children outside, she said.
“I wanted them to have a reason to go out basically into the backyard and just have some real life sort of experience with nature instead of just computer time,” said Shaffer, who lives in St. Charles, Missouri.
The four hens — Gertie, Jeff, Cherry and Rivers Cuomo — have been very healthy. They’re energetic. And they’re laying eggs.
It’s alligator mating season, which means Florida’s state reptiles will likely be more active and may have more interactions with humans.
GAINESVILLE, Fla.-Final approval of around-the-clockalligatorhunting is set to go before theFloridaFish andWildlifeConservation Commission when it meets next month in Gainesville.
Alligator hunting rules are part of the agenda on the first day of the two-day meeting, which will start May 3. The commission previously gave support to the hunting change on March 2.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed bird flu in three domestic chicken flocks in Idaho. Two flocks in Gooding County and one in Caribou County have tested positive in the past week.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza is a contagious viral disease that often leads to dead chickens. Human infections from bird flu are possible but rare.
Domestic poultry are particularly susceptible, said Dr. Scott Leibsle, the Idaho state veterinarian, in part because the state doesn’t have a good way to notify everyone who keeps birds in their backyard.
Liebsle said the best way to protect your flock is to limit contact with wild waterfowl. Geese and ducks often carry influenza as they migrate, including through Idaho in the Pacific Flyway.
“If your backyard birds are kind of free-ranging and have a little bit more area to roam around that would give them the opportunity to interact with wild waterfowl, try to limit that,” Leibsle said.
If you live near ponds or streams where the birds take off from or land, that could be an infection source, Leibsle said, because that’s often when they drop the fecal matter.
If you buy new birds, isolate them from your existing flock for two weeks. Positive flocks need to be depopulated.
In terms of symptoms, Leibsle said occasionally infected chickens will show signs of a respiratory virus, like swollen heads or nasal discharge, though not always.
“Unfortunately, the most common symptom of your birds being infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza is you coming out and there being dead birds — they often don’t show any symptoms that they’re sick,” he said.
Above all, make sure to wash your hands and your boots, Leibsle said, and try to limit the number of people who come into contact with your birds.
A group of doe graze in a yard in Dedham.Credit:Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
Letters submitted by BDN readers are verified by BDN Opinion Page staff. Send your letters toletters@bangordailynews.com.
Starting anarticleby telling readers that if they’re “lucky,” they can kill two animals this year instead of one is suited to a hunting magazine, not this newspaper.Many of your readers are appalled that deer are gunned down in Maine and that the deer population is managed — no, cultivated — to produce more deer so as to sell more hunting licenses and increase revenue.
Do members of Homo floresiensis still inhabit the Indonesian island where their fossils helped identify a new human species fewer than 20 years ago?
Gregory Forth
Apr 18, 2022
115
ABOVE:PEGASUS BOOKS, MAY 2022
In 2004, the scientific world was shaken by the discovery of fossils from a tiny species of hominin on the Indonesian island of Flores. Labeled Homo floresiensis and dating to the late Pleistocene, the species was apparently a contemporary of early modern humans in this part of Southeast Asia. Yet in certain respects the diminutive hominin resembled australopithecines and even chimpanzees. Twenty years previously, when I began ethnographic fieldwork on Flores, I heard tales of humanlike creatures, some still reputedly alive although very rarely seen. In the words of the H. floresiensis discovery team’s leader, the late Mike Morwood, last at the University of Wollongong in Australia, descriptions of these hominoids “fitted floresiensis to a T.” Not least because the newly described fossil species was assumed to be extinct, I began looking for ways this remarkable resemblance might be explained. The result is a book, Between Ape and Human, available in May 2022.
Coming from a professional anthropologist and ethnobiologist, my conclusions will probably surprise many. They might even be more startling than the discovery of H.floresiensis—once described by paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of the University of New England in New South Wales as tantamount to the discovery of a space alien. Unlike other books concerned with hominin evolution, the focus of my book is not on fossils but on a local human population called the Lio and what these people say about an animal (as they describe it) that is remarkably like a human but is not human—something I can only call an ape-man. My aim in writing the book was to find the best explanation—that is, the most rational and empirically best supported—of Lio accounts of the creatures. These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly. And I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times.
Between Ape and Human also considers general questions, including how natural scientists construct knowledge about living things. One issue is the relative value of various sources of information about creatures, including animals undocumented or yet to be documented in the scientific literature, and especially information provided by traditionally non-literate and technologically simple communities such as the Lio—a people who, 40 or 50 years ago, anthropologists would have called primitive. To be sure, the Lio don’t have anything akin to modern evolutionary theory, with speciation driven by mutation and natural selection. But if evolutionism is fundamentally concerned with how different species arose and how differences are maintained, then Lio people and other Flores islanders have for a long time been asking the same questions.
Lio folk zoology and cosmology also include stories of natural beings, specifically humans, transforming permanently into animals of other kinds. And they do this, in part, by moving into new environments and adopting new ways of life, thus suggesting a qualified Lamarckism. As my fieldwork revealed, such posited changes reflect local observations of similarities and differences between a supposed ancestral species and its differentiated descendants. Like the majority of named categories in Lio animal classification, these derivatives coincide with the species or genera of modern systematics. At the same time, Lio distinguish humans from nonhuman animals in much the same way as do modern Westerners, that is, not just on morphological grounds but by attributing complex expressions of culture, language, and technology exclusively to humans.
Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals, a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis. Yet in all instances, the position confers on Homo sapiens a unique status, thereby separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
For the Lio, the ape-man’s appearance as something incompletely human makes the creature anomalous and hence problematic and disturbing. For academic scientists, H.floresiensis is similarly problematic, but not so much for its resemblance to H.sapiens; rather, it’s because the species appears very late in the geological record, surviving to a time well after the appearance of modern humans. Whether H.floresiensis would have been any harder (or easier) to accept had it been interpreted as a bipedal ape rather than a species of human is difficult to say. Nevertheless, it’s interesting that Morwood, taking an implicitly unilinear view of hominin evolution and arguing for the species’ inclusion in Homo, spoke of the evidence that the diminutive hominin walked the Earth relatively recently as one “good reason” to classify H. floresiensis in our genus. For this can only mean that, in the view of this author, what survives until recent times has to somehow belong with us.
As for ape-men, the Lio identify them as animals. In fact, they are one of several animals that Lio people claim descended from humans. But this classification has nothing to do with geological dating or any paleoanthropological evidence. Instead, Lio people, who distinguish natural from supernatural (or spiritual) beings in essentially the same way religious Westerners do, interpret ape-men as non-human animals with reference to observable features that clearly separate them from invisible spirits; from other, more familiar animals; and, of course, from people. Some features of the ape-men might suggest a scientifically undiscovered species or population of modern apes. But Lio statements mostly count against this hypothesis, as does all we know about the biogeography of eastern Indonesia.
Our initial instinct, I suspect, is to regard the extant ape-men of Flores as completely imaginary. But, taking seriously what Lio people say, I’ve found no good reason to think so. What they say about the creatures, supplemented by other sorts of evidence, is fully consistent with a surviving hominin species, or one that only went extinct within the last 100 years. Paleontologists and other life scientists would do well to incorporate such Indigenous knowledge into continuing investigations of hominin evolution in Indonesia and elsewhere. For reasons I discuss in the book, no field zoologist is yet looking for living specimens of H. floresiensis or related hominin species. But this does not mean that they cannot be found.
Gregory Forth, now retired, was a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta for more than three decades. Read an excerpt of Between Ape and Human.
‘Urgent’ coordinated action to tackle overconsumption, farming subsidies and the climate crisis also needed to halt biodiversity loss
Protected parks such as Yellowstone national park in the US are ‘a good start’ say scientists, but more needs to be done to stop biodiversity loss. Photograph: Ryan Dorgan/AP
Expanding national parks and protected areas will not be enough to halt the destruction of nature, warn leading scientists, who say urgent action on overconsumption, harmful subsidies and the climate crisis is also required to halt biodiversity loss.
Governments are expected to commit to a Paris-style agreement for nature at Cop15 in Kunming, China, later this year, with targets that include protecting at least 30% of the oceans and land by 2030.
An analysis of the draft UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreement by more than 50 leading scientists has found that, while expanding protected areas will, if done well, help slow the destruction of the natural world, much more is needed to stop it.Q&A
Prof Paul Leadley, an ecologist at Paris-Saclay University and co-author of the report, said: “The target of protecting 30% of all land and seas is important and attracting a lot of attention. And expanding protected areas is a good start if done well, but far short of what is needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss – called ‘bending the curve’ for biodiversity.
“There is very good evidence that we will fail again to meet ambitious international biodiversity objectives if there’s too much focus on protected areas at the expense of other urgent actions addressing the threats to biodiversity.”
A “massive” reduction in harmful agricultural and fishing subsidies, holding global heating to 1.5C and tackling human overconsumption, including of meat, is necessary, the scientists said, as part of coordinated action across a diverse, interconnected set of “transformative” changes.
The 21 draft targets to be negotiated at Kunming include proposals to eliminate plastic pollution, reduce pesticide use by two-thirds and half the rate of invasive species introduction. The agreement aims to stop what some scientists have called the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, driven by human behaviour, which threatens ecosystems vital to human civilisation.
The analysis of the proposed agreement, conducted by the scientific bodies BioDiscovery and the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (Geo Bon), has been sent to governments, who will give their feedback later this month.
The assessment looked at the impact of three scenarios on halting and reversing biodiversity loss: business as usual, improved quality and quantity of conservation, and transformative change of society. It found that only the last scenario will have the desired effect, assuming global heating is limited to 1.5C.
“What we’re doing is trying to take the best science and explain why the global biodiversity framework looks like it does. A lot of countries are saying it’s so complicated. We’re trying to explain why you need all the pieces and how each piece fits together,” Leadley said.
The analysis comes after confusion over the breath and complexity of the draft agreement, which ranges from pollution to the inclusion of indigenous communities.
In March, governments are scheduled to hold in-person negotiations for the first time since February 2020, after several delays to the process. Governments have failed to meet a single target on halting the destruction of nature in the past decade.
María Cecilia Londoño Murcia, a researcher at the Humboldt Institute in Colombia and co-author of the analysis, said: “The sooner we act, the better. Time lags between action and positive outcomes for biodiversity can take decades, so we must act immediately and sustain our efforts if we are to reach the global goals by 2050.”
by
