Mystery elephant deaths in Kenya leave experts divided over cause

Conservationists and Maasai communities are calling for urgent answers as paralysis-like symptoms spread among elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park, with competing theories emerging over what is causing their deaths.


Issued on: 23/08/2026 - RFI

A mystery affliction has killed at least 20 elephants, mostly females or young males, since June in Kenya. © SIMON MAINA / AFP

A mysterious ailment has killed at least 20 elephants in southern Kenya since June, alarming conservationists and local communities as experts struggle to determine the cause of the deaths.

The latest victim was an 11-year-old male known as Genghis Khan, who was found lying on the ground in the Kitenden B reserve near Amboseli National Park, unable to stand and struggling to breathe.

Veterinarians tried to revive him with a glucose injection – one of the few options available while the cause of the illness remains unknown – but he died on Tuesday after repeatedly trying and failing to get back on his feet.

The deaths have affected mostly females and young males, with the animals displaying strikingly similar symptoms, including weakness and partial paralysis.

The incidents are particularly sensitive in the Amboseli ecosystem, a major wildlife destination overlooked by Mount Kilimanjaro across the border in Tanzania. Its elephant herds are one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions, making their unexplained deaths a concern both for conservationists and for communities whose livelihoods depend heavily on tourism.

“You would find one struggling for a day, struggling for two or even three days. Until they completely die,” said Patrick Papatiti, head of operations for the Olgulului communal lands, which include the Kitenden B reserve.

The growing number of carcasses has added to concern among conservationists.

At one site, the remains of a four-month-old calf lay partly eaten by hyenas and covered in flies. Elsewhere, vultures fed on the carcass of a pregnant elephant that had died close to giving birth, along with her unborn calf.

Poisoning suspicions

In late July, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said toxicology tests had detected high concentrations of cyanide in the elephant carcasses, raising the possibility that the animals had been poisoned by pesticides linked to nearby farms.

But a number of local wildlife experts and conservationists have dismissed this theory.

Papatiti, who grew up in the local Maasai community, believes the elephants are suffering from a disease rather than poisoning. He said there was “no way” cyanide could explain the pattern of deaths.

One reason for the scepticism is the apparent absence of deaths among other animals who have come into contact with the carcasses.

Scavengers including hyenas, vultures and insects have continued feeding on the remains without showing obvious signs of poisoning – something local observers say would be unusual if high levels of toxic chemicals were responsible.

The remains of an 11-year-old elephant named Genghis Khan in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, 18 August. © Patrick Papatiti

“If another animal feeds on that carcass and it is not dying, then definitely it is not a chemical,” said Joel Nyika, Amboseli ecosystem manager for the Kajiado County authorities.

Nyika also questioned suggestions that naturally occurring cyanide in vegetation could be responsible, arguing that if that were the case livestock grazing in the same areas would most likely also have been affected.

“As wildlife managers, we believe it could be a disease that is only affecting these elephants,” he said.

Paula Kahumbu, conservationist and head of Wildlife Direct, said there was still too little evidence to support the pesticide theory.

She also noted that relatively few adult males had died, despite the fact that they are the most likely to enter farmland and raid crops – behaviour that would theoretically expose them more to agricultural chemicals or deliberate poisoning.

Papatiti has also rejected the idea that farmers are intentionally poisoning elephants.

Hundreds of elephants die in Botswana in mysterious circumstances

However, the KWS said the evidence gathered so far does not point towards an infectious or transmissible disease. In a statement on 7 August, the wildlife authority said its findings had not indicated a contagious illness and sought to reassure visitors that travelling to the area remained safe.

Rather than looking for individuals to blame, Papatiti said, the priority should be establishing exactly what is causing the animals to fall ill.

He believes more elephants may have died without this being recorded and is concerned that similar cases could be occurring across the nearby border in Tanzania, part of the same wider ecosystem used by roaming herds.

“How many elephants will die before we can stop this?” he asked.

(with AFP)

 

New fossil evidence challenges the story of mammalian birth

The microscopic structure of fossilized bones helps solve ‘inscrutable mystery’ about the reproduction of ancestor of true mammals

Frontiers

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"Triassic Mothers," a life reconstruction of a group of Chiniquodon theotonicus individuals, a pregnant female (left) as well as a female (right) breastfeeding few, relatively large neonates.

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Credit: María de los Ángeles Miceli Baro.

Some cynodonts may have been giving birth to live young much sooner in evolutionary history than previously assumed. A new Frontiers in Mammal Science study has offered the first compelling evidence that cynodonts may have been viviparous – a reproductive mode characterized by live birth.

“We show for the first time that live birth was present in at least one mammalian ancestor, Chiniquodon theotonicus, which lived approximately 236 million years ago,” said lead author Dr Leandro Gaetano, a paleontologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. “This implies that viviparity among early cynodonts originated in the mammalian lineage at least 95 to 90 million years earlier than previously thought.”

An inscrutable mystery

“Cynodonts thrived in the Triassic, a period of recovery and restructuring of ecosystems after one of the most devastating mass extinctions in life history,” explained senior author Adriana Mancuso, a researcher at CONICET who focuses on the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems. “This meant high competition for resources and strong predatory pressures. Combined with a trend toward aridity and strong seasonality, embryos of viviparous species would be better protected than those of egg-laying species.”

The current study began during a postgraduate course when a growth mark was discovered in the bone microstructure of a fully grown C. theotonicus specimen found in northwestern Argentina. Data from alive species suggested it was a neonatal line, which is a distinct growth ring that can be found in bones or teeth. It’s the result of the strong acceleration of the growth rate that occurs just after birth.

To test their forming hypothesis, the team evaluated the neonate body mass relative to the adult body mass and compared the values of C. theotonicus to those of several thousand mammals, non-avian reptiles, and birds alive today.

“If mammalian ancestors were egg-laying or viviparous has been considered an inscrutable mystery,” said Gaetano. “We came up with a somewhat ingenious set of methods to get at something very difficult to analyze in the fossil record.”

Big babies

The size and weight of the C. theotonicus specimen at the time of its birth and death were estimated from measurements of its bones. This was done by measuring the neonatal line and the external surface, respectively. The team determined it weighed around 1.7kg at birth and around 12kg when it died. This means the newly born C. theotonicus weighed around 14% of the mass it would have reached by the time of its death.

Living reptiles, like some turtles, snakes, and crocodilians that weigh between 8kg and 14.5kg, produce hatchlings weighing between nine and 53g, which translates to very low neonate-adult body mass ratios of roughly 0.1% and 0.6%. Birds like some cranes, pelicans, or vultures that weigh between 8kg and 21.5kg produce hatchlings weighing between 110g and around 357g; a neonate-adult body mass ratio of around 1.3% to 4.5%.

When it comes to mammals of comparable size (weighing between 8kg and 15kg), newborns can be much heavier at between 35.5g and 1.87kg, which results in neonate-adult body mass ratios as high as 18.77%. The bay duiker antelope, for example, gives birth to young that weigh about as much as the newborn C. theotonicus. These calculations exclude non-placental mammals that lay eggs or harbour their newborns in belly-pouches and produce extremely small younglings.

“We were amazed to find that C. theotonicus grouped with extant placental mammals, being clearly distinct from other amniotes like reptiles or birds,” said Gaetano.

Turning a theory on its head

“In cynodonts, embryonic tissues were never observed before, let alone a neonatal line,” said co-author María Miceli Baro, a graduate student at the University of Buenos Aires. “Through its analysis, we found that a trait that is generally linked to evolutionary success was present in animals long before true mammals originated.”

Until now, birthing live young was considered a relatively modern evolutionary acquisition in the mammalian lineage. The finding raises questions regarding which other traits believed to have appeared much later were already present among cynodonts, said the team.

“It is very well possible that C. theotonicus does not represent an isolated case of viviparity among cynodonts. It could be evidence of the general switch from laying eggs to giving birth to live young early on in the mammalian lineage. But we need more evidence to test this hypothesis,” concluded Gaetano. “Still, it looks like some cynodonts were in fact very similar to present-day mammals.”

Skull of the Chiniquodon theotonicus individual that was used for this study.

Credit

Leandro Gaetano

Representation of neonate and adult Chiniquodon theotonicus. Recovered (yellow) and histologically analyzed (orange) bones of specimen CRILAR PV109, the individual used in this study.

Credit

Gaetano et al., 2026

The neonatal line in Chiniquodon.

Credit

Gaetano et al., 2026.

---

Journal

Frontiers in Mammal Science

DOI

10.3389/fmamm.2026.1845319 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Early Origin of Viviparity in the Mammalian Lineage

Article Publication Date

13-Aug-2026

“Capital Is Not a Thing”: The Legal System’s Pre-Distribution of Economic Power

David S. D’Amato

 July 15, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The popular political discourse frequently presents the idea that redistribution happens or can happen after markets yield conditions of inequality. But this narrative is fundamentally mistaken and misleading. Redistribution begins before firms, markets, or competition exist at all, because the legal concepts we use themselves confer economic value and they do so unevenly. The legal coding of capital acts as a distribution mechanism, routing economic value upward to the extremely rich.

Capitalism is not ultimately defined by exchange through markets, economic competition, or even property. Though it contains these elements, other systems have likewise included them. Capitalism depends on a suite of special legal attributes for capital. More precisely, capitalism is a system in which the state and the law define what is and can be capital in terms of the legal qualities created for and attached to it. As legal scholar Katharina Pistor writes, “Capitalism, it turns out, is more than just the exchange of goods in a market economy; it is a market economy in which some assets are placed on legal steroids.”

Professor Pistor argues that “capital is not a thing, but a quality, although most [economists] don’t know it yet.” Within this insight is the essential task of shifting our attention from the owners of capital to what makes something capital in the first place. The idea of capital as a quality and not a thing troubles some of the core assumptions of standard economic narratives. An economist might say that land plus labor and savings yields capital. Pistor’s argument is that in fact, an asset transforms into capital when the state, through the law, imbues it with certain powers and rights. It is decidedly not a question of protecting existing wealth, but of changing the social ontology and the real-world relationships of power.

The law determines whether an asset or an organization can survive forever, whether an asset can serve as collateral, whether a claim has priority over a competing one, whether there is personal liability for tortious conduct, whether an asset will generate monopoly rents, whether ideas can be private property, and whether and when there are particular legal protections and causes of action, etc. The state creates new forms of economic power that are kept beyond the reaches of ordinary people and the types and scales of property available to them. Thus is capital legally constituted wealth.

Capitalism is not only an economic system, and the power of capital within this system is not only economic power. It is an instantiation of state power. It is a system constituted by political and legal power in order to code selected organizations and asset categories with asymmetrical and differential capacities. The kinds of accumulation and inequality we find today are only possible within this framework. The state doesn’t ever merely “intervene” in the capitalist system, which is always already a system of both production and government. The state defines the concepts and categories through which this system operates, conferring power and privilege “by subtler chains than of old.” There is never an economic sphere that has an existence independent of political authority. The state creates and empowers the legal concepts determining the parameters of property, capital, contract, corporate structure, securities, lending and money, etc., and it selectively attaches different powers and prerogatives to each.

In this way, Pistor’s work bears a resemblance to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s account of capitalism. Wood argues that although our social system recognizes a difference between the political and the economic spheres, this kind of neat distinction is only possible because the foundational and constitutive work of political power has already been completed. The distinction itself is historically produced, and the political work (for example, using the law to push farmers off of their land, then consolidating and enclosing that land) recedes with surprising speed into the background of daily social life. Productive life within capitalism may then seem to take place and unfold independently from the political world, even as all of its concepts and institutions rest on political power.

Pistor’s work thus also presents a diagnostic argument remarkably similar to that of American individualist anarchists like Ezra Heywood. She says, “Capitalism empowers private actors to use critical social resources—the law and the money system, to list only the most obvious—to build private wealth and power at the exclusion of others, and with little accountability of those who have amassed this power over others they seek to control.” We take for granted the ruling class’s claim that the extreme structural inequalities of the present are natural features of a liberal society and a free market economy, yet even the billionaires feel comfortable admitting that we don’t have a free market of any kind.

Heywood argued that in fact “the natural laws of value and exchange condemn speculative increase.” We don’t know, because we’ve never tried anything but a political economy granting massive amounts of wealth and special legal position to large-scale masses of capital—precisely because, as Heywood also pointed out, property, wealth, and capital don’t naturally grow and accumulate, but “tend[] to diffusion and decay.” A system in which capital grows itself by itself is not possible absent the coercive power of the state. Heywood understood that without the continuous support of government, massive concentrations of capital would wither through physical depreciation in various forms, reduction and division through the generations, and true competition in the market. The concentrations of capital we have in the system today require enormous investments of “public” money and exemptions from rules everyone else must play by.

We can observe how the law’s coding of capital inoculates it at every stage and scale, and how this process leads to crisis. The monopolies and extremes of consolidation and concentration we find today are the sure results of this system: in the capitalist political economy, the larger companies consume their competitors and build legal and regulatory moats to protect their space from competition. That is, capitalism entails the destruction or preclusion of free markets. This is not at all surprising to anyone who has studied or experienced this system, but we are nonetheless compelled to accept the constant equating of capitalism with real, substantive economic freedom. Heywood did not oppose industry or trade, only the idea that wealth should enjoy an arbitrary legal right to increase itself without work. Elsewhere he writes,

Thus, by the perpetual value and increase allowed money, capitalists acquire a kind of supernatural power over laborers; so that a man of one generation can tax all future generations with the support of his offspring; and interest is the golden chain which binds the Prometheus industry, in order that vultures of moneyed aristocracy may feed on its vitals.

The system of capital aggrandizement undertakes redistribution less through visible and explicit subsidies (though these are crucial) than through the ordinary functioning of legal and economic concepts and institutions. Because the political-economic choices are there, but embedded in law, the system performs an alchemical transformation, making contingent privileges appear as natural rights or features of a free market. This successfully hides the system’s consequences for distribution and inequality and its political nature and origin. In short, it is a masterwork of the ruling class.

If the state wanted to give a direct subsidy of $250 million to a particular firm or industry, it would, in theory at least, have to pass through a normal appropriations process, ostensibly with hearings, detailed budgets, and discrete goals. It would be visible and politically contestable, even if only in a ceremonial or pro forma sense. But much greater transfers have been and continue to be achieved through subtler means that do not appear as transfers, baked into the system’s code, in Pistor’s terms.

If such effects can be accomplished through opaque legal doctrines around business organizations, intellectual property, creditor and debtor relationships, the tax system, banking and financial services, and securities, among many other areas (the list is always growing by design), then many of the most decisive transfers of substantive power and wealth can appear as both pre-political and pre-economic. They disappear entirely from the public or social consciousness.

Discussing “the transformation of private law after 1790,” legal scholar David Sugarman contended that “subsidisation through technical legal doctrine mystified the underlying political choices. It avoided spreading the cost over a wider segment of society and the more open public discussion and scrutiny that would have resulted if development had been encouraged by direct taxation.” This is part of how it is possible for the capitalist system to masquerade as a meritocratic free market. The state can distribute economic opportunity, bargaining power, and returns through juridical means no less than fiscal ones. It has many tools and continues to reconstitute economic hierarchies through complex and inaccessible privileges to capital. From the perspective of the capitalist and his counselors, the best subsidy is one that fades away into the background of the legal system itself, disappearing as a permanent feature of its design.

This system will be impenetrable and unchangeable for as long as we assume the truth of its concepts and categories. In treating capital as an object or thing, rather than as a kind of relationship produced by the force of law, we allow massive acts of economic pre-distribution to capital to pass as the neutral working of a free economy. Capitalism is a political and juridical system more than and before it is an economic one. If we can’t see the source code, we can’t mount a serious challenge to this political and economic system.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

Earthquake in Venezuela: The Struggle to Survive

Guillermo R Barreto

 July 13, 2026

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Photograph Source: Venezolana de Televisión – Public Domain

On 24 June, Venezuela was celebrating two important holidays: the 205th anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo, the battle that sealed the country’s independence, and the feast of St. John the Baptist, declared by UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a celebration with deep spiritual significance, especially for the Afro-descendant communities of Venezuela. A day of celebration that was cut short at 6:04 and 6:05 p.m. by two earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 on the Richter scale, respectively, with 39 seconds between them.

At the time of this writing, the official information released by the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, reports 1,719 deaths, 5,034 injured, 15,866 displaced, 855 damaged buildings (of which 189 collapsed completely), 38 affected hospitals, and 1,645 other structures—such as bridges and roads—damaged. This level of destruction is unprecedented in the country.

The earthquakes that occurred on 24 June constitute a unique event known as a seismic doublet. It involves the rupture of one fault (in this case, the Boconó Fault), which in turn triggers the rupture of another (the San Sebastián Fault). This phenomenon produces a highly asymmetrical, overlapping, and chaotic wave field. The rupture occurred from west to east, which is why the most severe effects were observed to the east of the epicenter. What makes this ‘double earthquake’ so deadly is that the waves produced by the second earthquake overlap with those of the first, amplifying its destructive power. The overlap also caused an earthquake that normally lasts 30-40 seconds to extend for 2 to 3 minutes, triggering a ‘perfect geodynamic storm.’ So far, 609 aftershocks have been recorded. A monster for which no one could have been prepared.

Immediately, like vultures, the media and so-called ‘influencers’ launched a campaign to dismiss the Venezuelan government’s response, arguing that the collapsed buildings were those constructed by the Venezuela Housing Mission—a program unique in the world that has provided housing to more than 4 million families (the reality is that 80 percent of the collapsed buildings were constructed by the private sector), and that civil protection agencies, firefighters, and rescue workers had failed to show up—all in an attempt to generate more distress and uncertainty among the population.

This is a truly dirty campaign that should put to shame those who, from the comfort of their computers, profit from the suffering of others and—lacking any serious proposals—criticize the government by spreading lies and causing chaos in an already highly delicate situation.

The reality is that as of 29 June, there were 30,000 rescue workers deployed—including military personnel, police, firefighters, civil protection personnel, and Red Cross staff—and 75,238 families have been assisted. 7,237,000 kilos of food have been distributed, 222,478 food bags have been distributed in La Guaira state (the hardest-hit area), 4,200 people have received medical assistance, 90 percent of the power supply has been restored, and even five days after the tragedy, the search for survivors continues. This effort has been joined by 10,834 volunteers who have been accredited to prevent disorder that would hinder rescue operations.

It is important to note that all of this mobilization and effort is taking place despite the more than 1,000 unilateral coercive measures (erroneously called ‘sanctions’) that the U.S. government has imposed on Venezuela, measures to which the European Union has also adhered. Both the U.S. and some EU countries offered ‘humanitarian aid’ to address the tragedy, but there could be no greater cynicism and hypocrisy on the part of those who have subjected the country to hardship for more than a decade with the sole aim of bringing about a change in government and plundering Venezuela’s many resources, including the world’s largest oil reserves. In fact, unilateral coercive measures are designed to undermine the will of the people through attacks on the economy, restrictions that prevent free trade with other countries, the export of the country’s products, and the import of everything that is not produced domestically but is needed—including not only spare parts and machinery but also food and medicine. It is a fact that, during the pandemic, for example, Venezuela was prevented from accessing the COVAX fund to purchase vaccines—a situation that could easily be characterized as an attempt at genocide.

Unilateral coercive measures are a perverse mechanism. A recent study published in the Lancet demonstrates, using rigorous statistical techniques and databases from the United Nations and the World Bank, that coercive measures—especially those implemented unilaterally by the U.S. (without United Nations authorization)—have a direct impact on public health, resulting in 564,258 deaths annually, a figure comparable to those caused by wars. The U.S. has killed more than 28 million people over the past 50 years through the imposition of unilateral coercive measures. These measures are illegal and violate international law and theCharter of the United Nations. A report issued in 2021 by the United Nations Special Rapporteur describes the grave situation Venezuela was facing that year as a result of these coercive measures, confirming the findings of the study we just cited.

It is this country, battered by these illegal and criminal measures—with hospitals and emergency systems compromised by years of attacks—that today faces a tragedy of superlative proportions. Fortunately, there has been sincere solidarity from countries such as Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua, among others, which are providing rescue workers, heavy equipment, medicines, and a great deal of compassion, and are supporting the arduous work carried out by Venezuelan teams. As for the United States—the country that, on January 3 of this year, bombed and kidnapped the president—we can only demand the immediate withdrawal of the coercive measures it has imposed and the release of President Nicolás Maduro and Congresswoman Cilia Flores. The hypocritical aid they offer is not welcome. In Venezuela, the government, the armed forces, and the people—organized with the help of true friends—are working tirelessly to save as many lives as possible and restore normalcy as soon as possible.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. 

Guillermo R Barreto is Venezuelan and holds a PhD in Science (Oxford University). He is a retired professor at Simón Bolívar University (Venezuela). He was Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, President of the National Fund for Science and Technology, and Minister of Ecosocialism and Water (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela). He is currently a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Transformations-IVIC.