Scientists in China created the first-ever mammal with fully reprogrammed genes

Joshua Hawkins - 

testing age reversing therapy on mice© Provided by BGR

Scientists have been messing around with genetics for years now. One of the most powerful gene-editing tools, CRISPR, has even allowed them to create genetically modified mosquitos and could let us make hypoallergenic cats sometime in the future, too. Now, scientists in China have made a massive breakthrough, creating the first genetically modified mammal to sport fully reprogrammed genes.

Breaking chromosomes


A simulated strand of DNA© Provided by BGR

The researchers published a paper in the journal Science detailing the process by which they made the first genetically modified mammal with fully reprogrammed genes. The team took each chromosome from a mouse and then broke them down. They reorganized them into a new combination, creating what they call Xiao Zhu, or “Little Bamboo.”

The new genetically modified mouse is a first for science, as the mammal is made up of completely reprogrammed genes. This is the first time that the modification of mammalian genes has been carried out on a scale of this magnitude, the scientists note in their paper.

Chromosomes are essentially the building blocks of evolution. It is these threads that hold DNA in a cell’s nuclei. Normally, chromosomes break apart and recombine naturally. That’s what helps drive organic evolution. It’s an extremely delicate and complicated process, and we’ve struggled to pull it off for years. That’s why this genetically modified mammal with fully reprogrammed genes is such a big piece of news.


scientists edited chromosomes to create a genetically modified mammal© Provided by BGR

Not only is this a huge milestone for genetic modification, but it also proves that humans can genetically modify animals at a chromosome level and still create living creatures. It’s also scary to think about the possibilities this could unlock. Mammalian genes are very complex, too, which makes this success even sweeter.

Of course, mistakes can happen during these processes, too. The scientists even encountered some errors when recombining chromosomes, which led to some of the genetically modified mammals dying shortly after modification (via South China Morning Post). However, Xiao Zhu’s existence proves that a little trial and error paid off in the long run. All of this research will further how humans study genetics, too.

Proving that we can create a genetically modified mammal with fully reprogrammed genes could also help spurn other research using CRISPR and genetic modification. And it could allow for new breakthroughs in synthetic biology as a whole.

Edmonton may be known for winter chill, but heat islands on the rise, researchers say

EDMONTON — Researchers at the University of Alberta say a city known for its bone-chilling winter temperatures also has potentially dangerous heat islands that have been getting hotter for the last two decades.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The heat-island effect measures the difference in surface temperature between urban and rural areas, said Sandeep Agrawal, a professor in the university's Faculty of Science.

It has been closely investigated in eastern cities such as Montreal and Toronto, he added.

"A winter city like Edmonton has not been studied for this phenomenon and we did not know if it was occurring here," Agrawal said in a recent interview.

"The big takeaway is Edmonton also experiences urban heat-island effect. This could be deadly for people during summer months, from headaches, to heatstroke, to even heat-related mortality like what we saw in B.C. last year where hundreds of people died.

"The deaths are attributed to heat islands."

The research, co-authored by post-doctoral researcher Nilusha Welegedara, is under review for publication.

Agrawal said Edmonton has numerous areas where the temperature of the ground has jumped by between 6 C and 12 C overall compared to rural areas over the past 20 years — and it's due to global warming and a loss of vegetation.

"Cities are getting more and more paved over with concrete and surfaces that absorb heat at the expense of vegetation," he said.

Agrawal and his team analyzed satellite images between 1999 and 2021 and examined 402 neighbourhoods, including industrial areas, residential areas and the North Saskatchewan River Valley, which stretches through the city and is one of largest urban parks in North America.

The study found the north side of the city and some downtown areas with low vegetation had higher temperatures than the south side, which was cooler because of the river valley and older neighbourhoods with features such as boulevard trees.

"Literature does say that heat exposure is much more pronounced among people who are marginalized and vulnerable, " he said.

"What we saw was that the neighbourhoods along the River Valley are cooler, and they're also occupied by people of a higher socio-economic status. So you can say that … it's the lower-economic status people who are a lot more affected by it."

Agrawal said the city's urban planning needs to take into account the hot summers that are becoming common along with cold winter weather.

“Cities like Edmonton have long focused on their identities as winter cities. I believe Edmonton’s identity is changing as the temperature rises over the years,” Agrawal said.

"When we are building new neighbourhoods, there needs to be some way of preserving vegetation and trees so that we can mitigate this effect as much as we can," he said.

The study also discourages the use of materials such as concrete and asphalt because it absorbs more heat.

"There are alternate material pavers available that can help," he said.

Agrawal said his team is now researching a similar trend in Calgary and Vancouver.

"Canada is supposedly a winter country. Edmonton especially is considered a winter city, but that's not the case anymore when you're talking about the urban heat-island effect."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 31, 2022.

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Fakiha Baig, The Canadian Press

Glencore Canadian mine workers reach 'tentative agreement' that could end three-month strike

Naimul Karim - 1h ago

Glencore's Raglan mine in Nunavik, Que., produces 40,000 tonnes of nickel annually. Six-hundred and thirty workers at the mine have been on strike since the end of May.

© Provided by Financial Post

Workers at Quebec’s largest nickel mine this week reached a “tentative agreement” with owner Glencore PLC that could restart production more than three months after 630 union members went on strike demanding better working conditions.

The work stoppage began on May 27 after 98 per cent of union workers agreed to push for a better work culture and criticized the increased use of subcontracting. In July, Glencore offered workers a new deal, which included a yearly compensation of at least $130,000, twice the average pay in Quebec, but 77 per cent of the workers rejected it.

“The 630 union members who work at the Raglan mine in Nunavik will be called upon to vote over the next two weeks,” the United Steelworkers Union said about Glencore’s latest offer in a press release on Monday.

A union official refused to disclose the terms of the offer, but on Wednesday said the strike would continue until the result of the vote is known. Meetings will be held next week so that members can better understand the new agreement.

Glencore wasn’t immediately available for a comment.

The Raglan mine in northern Quebec has been in operation since 1997 and annually produces about 40,000 tonnes of nickel. It includes four underground mines called Kikialik, Qakimajurq, Katinniq and Mine 2. Production at the mine has largely been on hold since the strike began.

As one of the largest producers of nickel in Canada, a prolonged closure of the mine could hurt global supplies of Class 1 nickel, which is needed to manufacture electric vehicles, said Patricia Mohr, a former vice-president of economics at the Bank of Nova Scotia, and now an independent analyst who follows battery metals.

In May, Eric Savard, president of the mine’s union, said in a press release that Glencore had been “continually pushing the limits” and that it had reached a point where those who refused to work overtime were given the “cold shoulder.”

Savard added that the mine often had “many more contractors” at the site than unionized workers, which meant fewer economic benefits for the local economy.

Glencore, however, denied the allegations at the time and said the mine had an 86-per-cent satisfaction rate based on internal surveys.

About 1,000 kilometres to the north, the jobs of more than 1,000 workers at a mine in Nunavut remain uncertain as their fortunes depend upon whether Baffinland Iron Mines Corp.’s extraction permit is renewed and enhanced by the federal government.

Workers received termination notices on July 31, but the company said it would rescind them if it gets a permit to increase its annual extraction limit of iron ore to six million tonnes from its original allowance of 4.2 million tonnes.

Some 1,100 workers are scheduled to be let go over two rounds on Sept. 25 and Oct. 11.

The federal government is waiting on a report by the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB), the territory’s environmental assessment agency. The feds asked the board to provide its recommendation by late August, but the NIRB on Aug. 25 said it intends to submit its report on Sept. 19, which is a week before the terminations begin.

“While the board understands that this timeline is greater than what was requested by the minister and urged by Baffinland and several parties, the board has balanced the urgency of the decision, with the board’s obligation to conduct a thorough assessment in the circumstances of each proposal,” NIRB’s chairperson Marjorie Kaviq Kaluraq, said in a letter .

Peter Ackman, a spokesperson for Baffinland, said the company was “optimistic” its permit would be renewed and the jobs “will be saved.”

But the union representing the workers say that the delay has disrupted the lives of the miners. “Its not realistic to issue a decision a few days before mass layoffs are about to start,” said Mike Gallagher, business manager for the International Union of Operating Engineers.

“It’s not like throwing a switch on or off. People have to plan. They start to make other arrangements. This erodes the workforce.”

Gallagher added that he wrote to the Ministry of Northern Affairs on Tuesday asking the federal government to exercise its authority by renewing the permit and “saving the jobs.”

• Email: nkarim@postmedia.com | Twitter: naimonthefield

US court dismisses Nazi-era Guelph Treasure art dispute


BERLIN (AP) — An American court has thrown out a lawsuit against a German museum foundation over a medieval treasure trove that was filed by heirs of Nazi-era Jewish art dealers, saying that the U.S. lacked jurisdiction to hear such a lawsuit.


Provided by The Canadian Press

The foundation that oversees Berlin’s museums said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last week granted the foundation's motion to dismiss the 2015 restitution lawsuit that was brought against it, bringing the case to an end in the U.S., absent an appeal by the plaintiff.

The Welfenschatz, or Guelph Treasure, which is at the center of a long-running ownership dispute, includes silver and gold crucifixes, altars, intricate silverwork and other relics worth more than 200 million euros (dollars).

The collection, which has been on display in Berlin since the early 1960s and is currently at the city’s Bode Museum, is considered the largest collection of German church treasures in public hands.

The heirs maintained that their ancestors had no choice but to sell the Christian artifacts in 1935 to the Nazi government for less than their value.

The state-run foundation that owns the collection has said the collectors weren’t forced to sell the treasures, arguing among other things that the collection was not even in Germany at the time of its sale.

On Tuesday, the president of the museum foundation, also known as the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz or SPK, Herrmann Parzinger, welcomed the court decision.

“SPK is pleased with the district court’s ruling, which affirms SPK’s long-held assessment that this lawsuit seeking the restitution of the Guelph Treasure should not be heard in a U.S. court," Parzinger said.

“SPK has also long maintained that this lawsuit lacked merit, as the Guelph Treasure’s sale in 1935 was not a forced sale due to Nazi persecution," he added.

The heirs originally pressed their claims in Germany, but a German commission found the artworks’ sale was made voluntarily and for fair market value. A suit was then filed in the United States. Germany and the SPK foundation argued the case did not belong in American courts.

The U.S. District Court’s ruling follows a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2021 that had overturned a lower court’s denial of the Berlin foundation's previous motion to dismiss this lawsuit.

Kirsten Grieshaber, The Associated Press

Trump's Truth Social not approved for Google Play store over content moderation concerns


“On August 19, we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” Google said in a statement, according to multiple reports.


Donald Trump launches Truth Social app© Provided by USA TODAY

“Last week Truth Social wrote back acknowledging our feedback and saying that they are working on addressing these issues,” Google added.

USA TODAY has reached out to Google for more information.

The delay was first reported by Axios.

Politics: Lawmakers press Meta, TikTok, Truth Social over threats to FBI after Mar-a-Lago search

Tech: Donald Trump’s social network deal facing grand jury scrutiny

The app launched on Apple’s App Store in February. Android users make up approximately 40% of smartphone users in the United States, according to multiple reports.

Trump Media & Technology Group, Truth Social’s parent company, in a press release said it has “worked in good faith with Google to ensure that the Truth Social Android App complies with Google’s policies without compromising our promise to be a haven for free speech.”

Trump announced last October that he would launch Truth Social, which made its debut in February. The former president was barred from Twitter and Facebook following the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that attempted to disrupt Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY

Student loan relief limited for many by US drug war's legacy

President Joe Biden says he hopes his proposal to forgive federal student loans will narrow the nation's racial wealth gap. But a generation of Black and Hispanic Americans was disproportionately shut out of one of the keys to Biden's plan: the Pell Grant program.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

As part of the “war on drugs” — a consequential, anti-crime legislative agenda that Biden championed as a U.S. senator — an estimated hundreds of thousands of convicted drug offenders had their access to federal financial aid delayed or denied, including Pell Grants and student loans. If they wanted to go to college after their prison terms ended, these offenders had to take on larger, often predatory, private student loans.

Some were discouraged from seeking federal aid by a requirement to disclose their drug record on financial aid applications, while others put off attending college or dropped out entirely.

The people most harmed by these policies: Black and Latino men, thanks to drug laws in the 1990s with harsh punishments for crack cocaine and marijuana offenses. Incarceration rates for men of color skyrocketed. The policies remained in place for 25 years, until Congress repealed the Pell Grant ban in 2020.

America’s student loan debt burden, which now tops $1.6 trillion, “is especially heavy on Black and Hispanic borrowers, who on average have less family wealth to pay for it,” Biden said last week as he announced the forgiveness plan.

The administration has offered to forgive up to $10,000 in student debt for individuals earning annual incomes of less than $125,000, or less than $250,000 for families. And its offer doubles the debt relief to $20,000 for borrowers who also received Pell Grants, a federal program that gives the neediest undergraduates aid that they don’t have to repay.

Studies show that Pell Grants — one of the nation’s most effective financial aid programs — routinely help more than half of Black students and almost half of Hispanic students afford college. According to the White House, among the 43 million borrowers who are eligible for debt relief under Biden’s plan, more than 60% are Pell Grant recipients.

The White House said in a statement to The Associated Press that the student debt relief plan will wipe away about half of the average debt held by Black and Hispanic borrowers, not counting the additional $10,000 cancellation for Pell Grant recipients.

In a speech Tuesday, after the AP story published, Biden said people leaving prison need help to successfully reenter society.

“If you served your time, you shouldn’t be deprived of being able to get a Pell Grant to go to school,” Biden said in remarks at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania on his administration’s plans to prevent crime. “You should be able to get a degree -- that’s the best thing you can do.”

Amid debate over whether Biden’s forgiveness plan goes far enough for disproportionately indebted communities, criminal justice reform advocates say the president’s solutions to the student debt crisis must be as comprehensive as the anti-drug laws were.

“I think there’s a particular onus on this administration and on this president to be part of the solution for issues that he was very deeply involved in,” said Melissa Moore, the director of civil systems reform at Drug Policy Alliance.

There’s a generation of former drug offenders who borrowed to pay for school, but don’t have Pell Grants or federal loans, and won’t have any of their student debt forgiven. According to a Student Borrower Protection Center report on private loan debt, Black students are four times as likely as white students to struggle in repayment of private loans.

“For people who previously would have had to check that box, there should be some mechanism by which, if you were excluded in the past, you are prioritized now for relief,” Moore said.

An AP review last year of federal and state incarceration data showed that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans, as a result of the war on drugs that President Richard Nixon declared in 1971. About 1 in 5 people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

Nixon’s Democratic and Republican presidential successors would go on to leverage drug war policies, responding to an alarming national surge in violent crime linked to the illegal drug trade, cementing the drug war’s legacy.

Following the passage of stiffer state and federal penalties for crack cocaine and other drugs, the incarceration rates for Black and Hispanic Americans tripled between 1970 and 2000. By comparison, the white incarceration rate only doubled in that same timespan.

Biden's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 put in place the ban on Pell Grants and other federal financial aid for people incarcerated in federal or state prison. However, then-Sen. Biden reportedly opposed the amendment that added the ban to his bill. At the time, his spokesperson said Biden believed education programs could break the cycle of recidivism among formerly incarcerated individuals.

Ultimately, Biden worked passionately to pass the crime bill he sponsored. Academic programs in federal and state prisons, which had been robust, dwindled severely nationwide.

Later, in 1998, Congress expanded the ban to exclude any student with a state or federal drug conviction from receiving Pell Grants and federal student loans, for as little as one year or indefinitely, depending on the number of convictions. Biden voted in favor of the measure, although his opinion on the Pell Grant provision was unclear.

In just the five years after the expanded ban took effect, the measure cost more than 140,000 would-be college students between $41 million and $54 million in Pell Grants per year, and between $100 million and $164 million in federal student loans per year, according to an estimate by the federal Government Accountability Office.

However, in 2006, Congress changed the ban on grants to drug offenders. It applied only to students whose convictions happened while they were receiving federal student aid, narrowing its effect significantly, although experts say the law still forced hundreds of enrolled students to drop out of college when they lost their aid. The ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated individuals was fully repealed when Congress passed the omnibus spending and COVID-19 relief legislation in December 2020.

Drug convictions no longer affect a student’s financial aid eligibility, although the question still appears on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. In April, the U.S. Department of Education expanded its Second Chance Pell Program, which provides grants to incarcerated students to help them enroll in academic programs. A further expansion of Pell Grants to incarcerated students begins in July 2023, according to the Department of Education.

For DeAnna Hoskins, the legacy of the war on drugs nearly cost her much-need Pell Grants and student loans. She attended college after her incarceration and, by happenstance, just after Congress lifted the ban on aid to people with drug convictions.

“The ’94 crime bill was so comprehensive in the destruction that it did," said Hoskins, the president of JustLeadershipUSA, a criminal justice reform group. She questions how Biden’s debt relief plan was crafted. “I feel like you’re piecemealing our liberation back to us.”

There are tens of thousands of people who had to get private student loans at high interest rates, because of the ban on Pell Grants, Hoskins added.

“This is why it’s so important, when decisions like this are being made, that the voices of people with lived experiences are present,” she said. “We can help you obtain the equity you’re seeking.”

___

Associated Press news researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed.

Justice Department memo exonerating Donald Trump was a 'fundamental betrayal': former solicitor general

AlterNet - Yesterday 
By Alex Henderson

Justice Department memo exonerating Donald Trump was a 'fundamental betrayal': former solicitor general© AlterNet

Since leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump hasn’t been shy about lambasting former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr— who he now despises for refusing to go along with the Big Lie and Trump’s false, totally debunked claim that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. Trump now views Barr as a Republican who, like former Vice President Mike Pence, didn’t have the courage to stick by him.

But before the election, Barr’s critics often slammed him for being a Trump loyalist who defended Trump vigorously after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Attorney Neal Katyal, in an op-ed published by the New York Times on August 30, offers some reasons why a recently released March 24, 2019 memo paints such a troubling picture of Barr and his relationship with then-President Trump.

The memo, released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 21, details Barr’s justifications for the DOJ clearing Trump of obstruction charges. These days, Trump views Barr as a traitor to the MAGA cause. But in 2019, he praised Barr as someone who had the backbone to come through for him in a way that former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions didn’t.

READ MORE: Justice Department releases memo explaining why it declined to prosecute Donald Trump for obstruction

“The memo released last week by the Justice Department closing the book on the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a frightening document,” explains Katyal, a former solicitor genreal who is often featured as a legal expert on MSNBC. “Critics have rightly focused on its substance, slipshod legal analysis and omission of damning facts. But the process by which that memo, sent in March 2019, came to be is just as worrisome.”

Related video: John Dean on DOJ memo: No question Barr let Trump off the hook

Duration 1:13  View on Watch

The attorney continues, “Delivered to the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, the memo was written by two political appointees in the Justice Department. Mr. Barr used the memo to go around the special counsel regulations and to clear President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. If left to fester, this decision will have pernicious consequences for investigations of future high-level wrongdoing.”

Katyal goes on to offer some more reasons why he finds the March 24, 2019 memo so troubling. As Katyal sees it, the memo is an example of the United States’ system of checks and balances being undermined during the Trump years.

“The 2019 memo tendentiously argued that Mr. Trump committed no crimes — leaving the final decision on the matter to Republican-aligned appointees instead of to the independent special counsel,” Katyal notes. “The challenge in devising the regulations was to develop a framework for the prosecution of high-level executive branch officials — which is harder than it sounds, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions. So, we are left with one of the oldest philosophical problems: Who will guard the guardians?”

READ MORE: Appeals court orders release of memo Bill Barr used to justify not prosecuting Donald Trump

During Mueller’s investigation, many MAGA Republicans tried to paint him as a Democratic partisan — even though the former FBI director was a conservative and a lifelong Republican who had been on very friendly terms with the George W. Bush Administration. But during the Russian investigation, Mueller’s admirers often praised him for valuing country over party. When Democrats and Never Trump conservatives used the word “institutionalist” to describe Mueller in 2017 or 2018, it was meant as high praise.

A special counsel in a federal investigation, Katyal stresses, needs to be someone who is independent rather than partisan — which Special Counsel Mueller was. But Barr, Katyal laments, undermined Special Counsel Mueller’s work in the end.

“We created the role of special counsel to fill a void — to concentrate in one person responsibility and ultimate blame so that investigations would not be covered up from the get-go and to give that person independence from political pressure,” Katyal writes. “It is outrageous that Mr. Barr acted so brazenly in the face of this framework. The point of requiring a special counsel was to provide for an independent determination of any potential criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether he committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves. This was a fundamental betrayal of the special counsel guidelines not for some principle, but because it protected their boss, Mr. Trump.”

READ MORE: The FBI's Mar-a-Lago search was Donald Trump's 'Al Capone moment'

 A dozen different Trump administration memoirs reveal how they were 'uniquely unsuited' to handle crisis: reporter

Raw Story - Yesterday 
By Travis Gettys

President Donald Trump looks on as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx delivers remarks during a coronavirus update briefing© provided by RawStory

More than a dozen former officials in Donald Trump's administration have revealed in their memoirs how the former president and his team were "uniquely unsuited" to handle the coronavirus pandemic.

The Washington Post reviewed more than 4,000 pages from those publications written by health leaders, White House advisers and other Trump officials that, taken together, show an administration where top appointees and career scientists fought for the attention of an easily distracted and temperamental president and his deputies -- and their quarrels continue in print.

“What I see now mostly is political scapegoating and blaming,” Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing coordinator whose own book is due next year, told the Post in an email. “My book is VERY different."

Dr. Deborah Birx, a career civil servant who served as the White House pandemic coordinator, admits she sometimes concealed her long-term goals in hopes of persuading Trump on short-term policies, but she detailed how Scott Atlas, a Stanford radiologist who won favor with the former president, provided hopeful but misleading data minimizing the risks.

IN OTHER NEWS: Trump is losing it on Truth Social as his legal troubles continue to mount

"‘We will never shut down the country again. Never,’ ” Trump told her in April 2020, according to Birx's own memoir.

However, most of these books have been harshly criticized as self-serving and misleading, and critics say those Trump officials should have spoken out when they were serving in the administration instead of waiting until they had a book deal.

“This is my first call to ban a book,” said Sheila Kaplan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the coronavirus response, after Birx’s book was announced. “When Birx was in office, she hung up on me when I called from NYT to ask what was happening. At this point, who cares what she has to say?”

UN raises alarm on Red Sea oil tanker 'time-bomb'

AFP - Yesterday 

The UN appealed Tuesday for the last $14 million needed to try and prevent a stricken oil tanker from triggering a disaster off Yemen that could cost $20 billion to clean up.


The decaying 45-year-old FSO Safer has not been serviced since Yemen was plunged into civil war more than seven years ago

© Handout

The decaying 45-year-old FSO Safer, long used as a floating storage platform and now abandoned off the rebel-held Yemeni port of Hodeida, has not been serviced since Yemen was plunged into civil war more than seven years ago.

If it breaks up, it could unleash a potentially catastrophic spill in the Red Sea.

David Gressly, the United Nations' resident and humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, leads UN efforts on the Safer.

"Less then $14 million is now needed to reach the $80 million target to start the emergency operation to transfer oil from the Safer to a safe vessel," said Gressly's communications advisor Russell Geekie.

"We're deeply concerned. If the FSO Safer continues to decay, it could break up or explode at any time," he told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from Sanaa.

"The volatile currents and strong winds from October to December will only increase the risk of disaster. If we don't act, the ship will eventually break apart and a catastrophe will happen. It's not a question of if, but when."

He said the result would potentially be the fifth largest oil spill from a tanker in history, with the clean-up costs alone reaching $20 billion.

The Safer contains four times the amount of oil that was spilled by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, one of the world's worst ecological catastrophes, according to the UN.

"It would unleash an environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophe," said Geekie.

The ship contains 1.1 million barrels of oil. The UN has said a spill could destroy ecosystems, shut down the fishing industry and close the lifeline Hodeida port for six months.

The Safer is unusable, is fit only for scrappage and nothing on it works, said Geekie.

"This is a ticking time bomb," he warned.

"You don't want to go and smoke a cigarette on the deck, I can tell you that much."

rjm/nl/lth

B.C. is tops, Quebec is the bottom and we can't decide on Alberta, according to poll

Brian Lilley - Toronto Sun


Vancouver as seen from viewpoint on the road to Cypress bowl.

When Canadians are asked which province, they like the best, other than the one they live in, British Columbia is far and away the winner. As for which province they like the least, other than the one they live in, it’s Quebec as the frontrunner.

Alberta is second on both lists. Seems we can’t make up our minds on the Wild Rose Province.

A poll of 1,516 Canadians conducted between Aug. 19-21 by Leger for Postmedia found that most of us would choose B.C. as our favourite part of the country. A total of 30% of Canadians selected B.C. as their favourite other part of the country at the high end while Manitoba was the lowest-ranking province with just 1% selecting it and 0% chose Nunavut.

The main reason we are attracted to British Columbia? It’s the scenery, obviously, with 51% saying geography and landscape are the factors that attract us followed by 42% who say nature and wildlife or 27% who say it is more laid back.

While B.C. is the first choice of next-best province, the second choice at 12% is Alberta followed by Nova Scotia and Ontario at 10% and Prince Edward Island at 8%. Just 6% chose Quebec, which is also the least favourite province.

Quebec was chosen as the least favourite province by 21% of the country followed by Alberta at 10%. The main reason people gave for not liking either place was the same, they didn’t like the people.

Of those who said Quebec was their least favourite place, 49% cited the people of the province while 47% of those who said Alberta was their least favorite province said the same. Among the 8% who said Saskatchewan was their least favourite, 60% claimed the province was boring.

Manitoba was also seen as boring by 59% of those who didn’t like it while Ontario was cited as being too hectic and not relaxing by 36% of those who said it was their least favourite province.

Israeli archaeologists dig up large tusk of ancient elephant

KIBBUTZ REVADIM, Israel (AP) — Israeli archaeologists recently unearthed the titanic tusk of a prehistoric elephant near a kibbutz in southern Israel, a remnant of a behemoth once hunted by early people around half a million years ago.


Israeli archaeologists dig up large tusk of ancient elephant

The Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday that the 2.5-meter (yard) long fossil belonging to the long-extinct straight-tusked elephant was found during a joint excavation with researchers from Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University.

Israel Antiquities Authority prehistorian Avi Levy, who headed the dig, said it was “the largest complete fossil tusk ever found at a prehistoric site in Israel or the Near East.”

The site was dated to the late lower paleolithic period, around 500,000 years ago, based on stone tools found in the vicinity, the antiquities authority said.

Omry Barzilai, an IAA archaeologist, said the find was “very puzzling, very enigmatic” because it was not clear whether ancient people hunted the behemoth on the spot or whether they brought the felled animal's tusk to this spot.

The tusk was found near a kibbutz on the central plain running parallel to Israel's Mediterranean coast. But half a million years ago, when the ancient elephant died, the now-arid terrain was likely a swamp or shallow lake, an ideal habitat for ancient hominids.

The Associated Press