Buddhist Ceremonial Release of Captive Birds May Harm Wildlife [Slide Show]

Features | Evolution

Buddhists across Asia release wildlife as a show of compassion, but conservationists find that the practice tortures the animals and may impact threatened species

By Rachel Nuwer ?| August 1, 2012

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Freshly captured from the peat swamp forests of southern Vietnam, this greater coucal will likely wind up on a dinner plate, as a caged pet or as a merit release offering. Image: Courtesy of Rachel Nuwer

A young Vietnamese woman?s husband fell ill. Desperate for a cure, she later recounted, she visited the local Buddhist temple. A monk there instructed her to ?release 40 birds, one for every year of your husband?s life.? So she did, purchasing and releasing 40 birds at the temple grounds. The woman soon rejoiced; her husband made a full recovery.

This is a common story in Asia, where ?merit releases? of captive wild animals are performed in Buddhist rituals. But the practice raises concern amongst the conservation community for its potential to impact threatened species. Before a bird can be freed, it has to be captured?often just after having been released by someone else. The result is the denuding of wild populations and a vast recycling of mistreated animals, most of which are likely die on one of their ersatz flights to freedom. As if that were not bad enough, the dead, disease-ridden animals are then sold in food markets.

? View Photos of Merit Releases in Asia

?We were staggered by the number of birds moving through this trade,? says Martin Gilbert, a veterinarian at the Wildlife Conservation Society who recently co-authored a study in Biological Conservation on merit releases. ?It?s a very good rational and understandable thing to do, to let captive animals go free,? he says. ?But in certain situations, it creates a trade purely for demand for animals in cages.?

Gilbert and his colleagues monitored daily sales of merit release birds in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, over a period of 13 months. From their findings, they estimated nearly 700,000 animals pass through the local trade annually. They recorded a total of 57 bird species in the cages, including globally near-threatened Asian golden weavers and vulnerable yellow-breasted buntings.?

?This paper highlights the potentially huge impact merit releases have on a few birds that are easily caught and are already of conservation concern,? says John Pilgrim, a conservation consultant who specializes in Southeast Asia and Melanesia and who was not involved in the study.

Gilbert says he knows of only one other study, conducted in Hong Kong, which attempted to estimate merit release figures. The numbers were comparable, reporting that Hong Kong Buddhist temples released up to 580,000 birds per year.

?It?s pretty scary that this [new] paper estimates just a dozen families in two small markets sold more than 630,000 birds per year,? Pilgrim says.

Conservationists do not know how the merit release market figures into Asia?s overall wildlife trade, which also exploits wild birds for pets, food, passerine fights and song contests. Globally, trade in wild birds impacts about 400 species that are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature?s Red List, or one third of all threatened bird species. No one know how many birds succumb each year to the wildlife trade since much of the trafficking is illegal, but within Southeast Asia alone, it is likely ?in the order of tens of millions,? says Kelly Edmunds, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in England who investigates the emerging infectious diseases amongst bird sellers in Asia and was not involved in the study.

Buddhists free captive animals in order to accumulate health and longevity merits for themselves and loved ones. The exact origins of the practice are unclear, though it was mentioned in fifth-century Chinese Buddhist texts that instructed followers to ?practice the act of releasing animals due to the mind of compassion.?

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=c5611f8efb4ba712293d55bc67bf4735

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'Total Recall' Pays 'Loving' Homage To Original

'I don't think telling a similar story negates the other one or is an insult to it,' Kate Beckinsale tells MTV News.
By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Colin Farrell in "Total Recall"
Photo: Sony

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1691041/kate-beckinsale-total-recall-homage.jhtml

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Twitter?s new Political Index tracks sentiment toward Obama, Romney

Twitter launched a new tool Wednesday, the Twitter Political Index, that will track the Twitter-verse?s feelings about Obama and Romney in real time.

The Twitter Index, in partnership with real-time search engine Topsy, will sort through 400 million tweets a day from 140 million active users and use a ?sentiment analysis? in order to determine which candidate the tweet is about and whether it is positive or negative.

While the computers naturally have trouble identifying irony or sarcasm, Buzzfeed reports that Topsy?s algorithms ?agree with a randomly selected human 90 percent of the time on what a tweet means, validated over 30,000 tests.?

Buzzfeed also notes that the Twitter graph seems to match the ebbs and flows of Gallup polls, which suggests some degree of consistency between the metrics.

Users, however, won?t immediately be able to identify why particular spikes in popularity occur, since there is no way to find related news data inside the Index itself.

Topsy?s chief scientist Rishab Ghosh addressed concerns about whether the users on Twitter represent an accurate cross-section of America by saying ?while it?s true that Twitter and Internet usage is different from general population, it?s not true to say that this is somehow unrepresentative.?

?The demographics are very very broad based. It?s a large proportion of [the] US population.?

Ghosh told USA Today, ?This is not an alternative, it?s not a replacement for opinion polls. It?s a new sort of information that there was no way of accessing. We aren?t asking anybody anything. People are saying things on their own.?

It does seem, however, that this new information probably won?t be predictive of the election outcome this November.

Marc Smith, founder of the Social Media Research Foundation told USA Today that, like with photos of a political rally, ?descriptions of social media discussion spaces can be important news, but we do not usually ask crowd photos to predict outcomes, even when they are newsworthy.?

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-political-index-tracks-sentiment-toward-obama-romney-210205780.html

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Republican ads woo disillusioned Obama voters

NEW YORK (AP) ? One Republican campaign ad describes the "buyer's remorse" some voters feel about President Barack Obama. Another ad features a woman saying she had supported Obama because "he spoke so beautifully," but he's failed to deliver on his promises. Still another ad woos Obama supporters with a direct but gentle prod: "It's OK to make a change."

Come on in, the water's fine. That's the message from Republicans as they try to persuade voters who supported Obama in 2008, many of them women, to switch to Republican candidate Mitt Romney this time.

Nearly all of the $100 million Romney and his allies have spent on TV ads in general election battleground states has been aimed at a single audience: swing voters who say they like Obama personally but are disappointed in his job performance. To reach those voters, Republicans have adopted a political soft sell: Coax them to consider Romney without criticizing the choice they made four years ago.

"You have to approach those voters with a respect for their former votes but to point them in a new direction," said Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for the pro-Romney groups American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together have spent about $34 million on campaign ads so far. "There is a worry that the tonality of an ad, if it's too harsh, will turn off those voters and thus have them tune out the message."

The soft-sell approach drew a rebuke from Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who said Republican appeals to women in particular would fall short.

"There is no campaign ad that can change Mitt Romney's out-of-whack positions on issues important to millions of women across the country," Psaki said, citing Romney's support for a budget plan offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that would make deep cuts to programs like Head Start.

The Obama campaign is running a hard-hitting ad campaign aimed at mitigating Republican overtures to undecided voters, depicting Romney as a tone-deaf plutocrat whose policies would hurt the middle class. The Obama team has recently deployed the president himself in some ads, having him speak to the camera in a reassuring voice as a way to remind undecided voters of what they liked about him.

"You have a choice to make. Not just between two political parties or even two people. It's a choice between two very different plans for our country," Obama says in one ad.

To be sure, most ads from Romney and the Republican-leaning super PACs have been highly critical of Obama, bashing him for his handling of the still-fragile economy and persistently high unemployment. But most also have steered clear of criticizing the president personally.

Collegio pointed to 2004, when President George W. Bush's re-election campaign ran ads mocking Democratic rival John Kerry as an elitist who liked to wind surf. "Personal attacks at Obama because of his temperament and because of his good family pedigree are just going to be difficult to complete in the same way," he said.

Crossroads and other groups are even acknowledging in some of their ads the pride many now-disillusioned voters felt when casting their vote for Obama four years ago.

The Republican Jewish Coalition this week unveiled a new campaign, "My Buyer's Remorse," to appeal to Jewish voters who had supported Obama. Its debut spot features Michael Goldstein, a Democrat from New Jersey who voted for and raised money for Obama.

"I was a big Obama supporter. I really believed in him and what he stood for," Goldstein said, adding that his enthusiasm cooled because of the economy and Obama's policy toward Israel. "I've never voted for a Republican for president, but this time I'm going to vote for a Republican for president."

The ad is part of a $6.5 million campaign that was launched online Monday. The group will begin airing ads on television in September, director Matt Brooks said.

"These are real people telling their stories, not the big, bad Republicans here to hit you over the head with a 2-by-4," Brooks said. "There's no red meat, there are no scary pictures. And that's by design."

The Republican National Committee has put another $5 million behind a TV ad that's one the gentlest, calmest political spots on the airwaves.

The ad shows Obama taking the oath of office surrounded by his family. "President Obama came to the White House with big plans," it says, ticking through promises Obama made like reducing unemployment and cutting the deficit in half.

"He tried, you tried. It's OK to make a change," the ad says.

Republicans say the ad fares well especially with women, who are among the president's strongest constituencies and whom the Obama campaign is counting on to come out for him in large numbers.

"They like him personally, but they don't feel he's done the job," RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said. Instead of taking an us-against-them tone, he said, the message is, "We're all in this together."

Crossroads GPS ran an ad earlier this year that was noteworthy for its direct pitch to women. The ad featured a single mother worrying about her own retirement and the employment prospects for her two children.

"I supported President Obama because he spoke so beautifully. He promised change, but things changed for the worse," the woman said.

Mike McKenna, a Republican who runs an independent polling and strategy firm, told colleagues months ago that Republicans needed to help disappointed voters get over the hurdle of acknowledging that their 2008 support for Obama was a well-intentioned mistake.

McKenna said he and other researchers kept hearing the same thing from voters in focus groups. "They took a chance" with Obama in 2008, he said, "and it was a good chance."

"They just need some permission to say it didn't work out," McKenna said. Ads that made Obama out to be an idiot, he said, "implied you're an idiot for voting for him."

___

Associated Press writer Charles Babington in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bfouhy

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/republican-ads-woo-disillusioned-obama-voters-064920000.html

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Source: http://casinoandgamblingnews.com/online-poker/creating-favorable-online-gaming-legislation-will-require-teamwork-from-reid-las-vegas-sun-4/

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Syria's Assad urges his army to step up the fight

BEIRUT (AP) ? Syrian President Bashar Assad urged his armed forces Wednesday to step up the fight against rebels as the U.N. reported a significant escalation in the civil war with the military using warplanes to fire on opposition fighters in the battle for Aleppo.

Sausan Ghosheh, the spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Syria, said that international observers had witnessed warplanes firing in Syria's largest city, where intense fighting has been raging for 12 days. She said the situation in Aleppo was dire, with "heavy use of heavy weapons" including tanks, which the rebels now possess as well.

"Yesterday, for the first time, our observers saw firing from a fighter aircraft. We also now have confirmation that the opposition is in a position of having heavy weapons, including tanks," she said, adding that for civilians, there "is a shortage of food, fuel, water and gas."

Residents of Aleppo have told The Associated Press over the past week that jet fighters have been strafing rebel positions and there are numerous videos on the Internet posted by activists showing rebels commandeering regime tanks after conquering their bases.

Aleppo, a city of some 3 million, has been wracked by violence since rebels attempted to take it over and succeeded in holding several neighborhoods despite daily assaults by regime tanks, helicopters and warplanes.

On the 67th anniversary of the Syrian army's founding, Assad pushed his armed forces to redouble their efforts in the fight in a speech that was not televised but only appeared in the army's magazine and the state news agency.

"Today you are invited to increase your readiness and willingness for the armed forces to be the shield, wall and fortress of our nation," he said.

The regime has characterized the rebellion as the work of foreign terrorists, and Assad claimed "internal agents" are collaborating with them.

"Our battle is against a multi-faceted enemy with clear goals. This battle will determine the destiny of our people and the nation's past, present and future," he said.

Assad has not spoken in public since a bomb on July 18 killed four of his top security officials during a rebel assault on Damascus and has only appeared on television once. His whereabouts are unknown and it is not even clear if he is in the capital.

Syria's powerful military, which has largely held together over the course of the uprising, is vital to keeping Assad in power. The pace of defections has been rising recently, however. Neighboring Turkey reports that 28 generals have already crossed the border.

In recent weeks, the military has unleashed heavy weapons against the increasingly bold rebels who have brought the fight to the country's two largest cities. The military managed to drive the rebels out of the capital Damascus a week after their assault with fierce bombardments of neighborhoods followed by house-to-house searches.

Minor clashes with the rebels around Damascus continue, however, and in the early hours of the morning Wednesday residents of the Christian neighborhood of Bab Touma in the old city of Damascus reported a half-hour gun battle.

There was also ongoing fighting in several other cities, including central Homs, on Wednesday. Homs saw sharp clashes between rebels and regime forces and was bombarded by mortars, artillery and rockets, according to the activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In Aleppo, the state news agency reported several victories by government forces, especially in the hotly contested rebel bastion of Salaheddine, saying dozens of "terrorists" had been killed, including some with "African" nationalities.

A high-ranking Western diplomat familiar with the intelligence assessments on Syria said earlier this week that there is a great deal of concern in the West over the flow of foreign militants into Syria to fight a jihad, or holy war, against Assad's regime.

Militants from Chechnya, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been joining the rebels in significant number, he said. They are entering by way of Iraq and Lebanon and bringing along skills gleaned from battling the Americans and Russians, according to the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss such matters.

Rebels said they had extended their control over the strategic city by taking two police stations in Saliheen and Bab al-Neyrab neighborhood in the battles that lasted several hours.

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry spokesman said a Ukrainian military plane took off from Aleppo with 138 Ukrainians, 15 Poles who were trapped by the fighting. The spokesman Oleksandr Dikusarov said it will stop over briefly in Damascus to pick up some 40 Ukrainians before heading for Kiev's Boryspil airport.

The evacuees reached Aleppo airport safely, despite attacks on the access road, said Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Marcin Bosacki.

Rome-based World Food Program said it was sending to Aleppo enough emergency food aid for 28,000 people. The U.N. agency is distributing rations along with its local partner, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

Turkey launched a military drill just across the border from a Syrian town it claims is controlled by Kurdish rebels ? a show of muscle aimed at Kurdish separatists pushing for autonomy within Turkey's borders.

The Turkish government last week said Turkish Kurdish rebels have seized control of five towns along the border in collaboration with their Syrian counterparts. Turkey alleges that the Kurdish guerrillas they are fighting have taken advantage of the strife in Syria to take refuge there.

The idea that Syria, like northern Iraq, could become a safe haven for Turkish Kurdish rebels is an anathema to Turkey's leaders, who otherwise have been very supportive to the rebels fighting Assad.

____

Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, Selcan Hajaoglu in Ankara, Turkey, Victor Simpson in Rome, Monika Scislowska in Warsaw and Anna Melnichuk in Kiev, Ukraine contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrias-assad-urges-army-step-fight-151518303.html

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Drones and iPad Apps May Help in Power Failures

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Utility companies are experimenting with iPad apps and aerial robots to help get the lights back on faster after storms by providing information and logistical support.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=66a1cc511f144d9142ebec7da9efab79

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