Author Archives: plug_the_plugger

Cholera Epidemic Envelops Coastal Slums in West Africa

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DAKAR, Senegal — A fierce cholera epidemic is spreading through the coastal slums of West Africa, killing hundreds and sickening many more in one of the worst regional outbreaks in years, health experts said.

By ADAM NOSSITER (from nytimes.com)

Cholera, transmitted through contact with contaminated feces, was made worse this year by an exceptionally heavy rainy

season that flooded the sprawling shantytowns in Freetown and Conakry, the capitals of Sierra Leone and neighboring Guinea.

 

In both countries, about two-thirds of the population lack toilets, a potentially lethal threat in the rainy season because of the contamination of the water supply. Doctors Without Borders said there had been nearly twice as many cholera cases so far this year as there were in the same period in 2007 in Sierra Leone and Guinea, when it said the area experienced its last major outbreak.

Already, more than 13,000 people suffering from the disease’s often fatal symptoms — diarrhea, vomiting and severe dehydration — have been admitted to hospitals in the two nations’ capitals, and 250 to 300 have died, Doctors Without Borders said.

Ethiopia prime minister and Africa strongman Meles Zenawi dies suddenly

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(from nbcnews.com)

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a senior Africa figurehead, died of an infection while being treated abroad for an undisclosed illness, state-run television said on Tuesday. Speculation that Meles, 57, was seriously ill grew after he failed to attend an African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa last month. “Prime Minister Zenawi suddenly passed away last night. Meles was recovering in a hospital overseas for the past two months but died of a sudden infection at 11:40 (on Monday night),” state television said. Hailemariam Dessalegne, the deputy prime minister, was expected to be sworn in early Tuesday, according to the Twitter account of the Addis Fortune newspaper in Addis Ababa.

More than 30 killed in S. Africa shooting, fighting for fair wages

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South African police officers killed more than 30 striking workers at a Lonmin PLC platinum mine who charged a line of officers trying to disperse them, authorities said Friday. (from yahoo.com)

Mining, according to the Chamber of Mines:

  • Creates one million jobs (500 000 direct and 500 000 indirect).
  • Accounts for about 18% of GDP (8.6% direct, 10% indirect and induced).
  • Is a critical earner of foreign exchange at more than 50%.

The shooting Thursday is one of the worst in South Africa since the end of the apartheid era.
Police ministry spokesman Zweli Mnisi told The Associated Press on Friday that more than 30 people were killed. He said an investigation into the shooting near Marikana, about 70 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Johannesburg was underway.

The shooting happened Thursday afternoon after police failed to get the striking miners to hand over machetes, clubs and other weapons.
Some miners did leave, though others carrying weapons began war chants and soon started marching toward the township near the mine, said Molaole Montsho, a journalist with the South African Press Association who was at the scene.

The police opened up with a water cannon first, then used stun grenades and tear gas to try and break up the crowd, Montsho said.

Suddenly, a group of miners rushed through the underbrush and tear gas at a line of police officers. Officers immediately opened fire, with miners falling to the ground. Dozens of shots were fired by police armed with automatic rifles and pistols. […]

It was an astonishing development in a country that has been a model of stability since racist white rule ended with South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994. The shooting recalled images of white police firing at anti-apartheid protesters in the 1960s and 1970s, but in this case it was mostly black police firing at black mine workers.

It remains unclear what sparked the miners’ fatal charge at police. Mnisi, the police ministry spokesman, claimed the miners shot at police as well, using one of the weapons they stole from officers Monday.

“We had a situation where people who were armed to the teeth, attack and killed others — even police officers,” the spokesman said in a statement Thursday night. “What should police do in such situations when clearly what they are face with are armed and hardcore criminals who murder police?”

President Jacob Zuma said he was “shocked and dismayed at this senseless violence.”

“We believe there is enough space in our democratic order for any dispute to be resolved through dialogue without any breaches of the law or violence,” Zuma said in a statement.

Barnard O. Mokwena, an executive vice president at Lonmin, would say only: “It’s a police operation.” In a statement earlier Thursday, Lonmin had said striking workers would be fired if they did not appear at their shifts Friday.

“The striking (workers) remain armed and away from work,” the statement read. “This is illegal.”

While the initial walkout and protest focused on wages, the ensuing violence has been fueled by the struggles between the dominant National Union of Mineworkers and the upstart Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. Disputes between the two unions escalated into violence earlier this year at another mine.

Mining drives the economy of South Africa, which remains one of the world’s dominant producers of platinum, gold and chromium. Lonmin is the world’s third largest platinum producer and its mine at Marikana produces 96 percent of all its platinum. The violence has shaken the precious metals market, as platinum futures ended up $39, or 2.8 percent, at $1,435.20 an ounce troy. in trading Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Lonmin stock plunged 6.76 percent Thursday on the London Stock Exchange. The company’s stock value has dropped more than 12 percent since the start of the unrest.

Fossils point to a big family for human ancestors and supporting the idea of some scientists that there is a chance that the cucasians are of different origin

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Jaw structures suggest that at least three homo species once roamed the African plains. (from Nature.com)

Fossilized skulls show that at least three distinct species belonging to the genus homo existed between 1.7 million and 2 million years ago, settling a long-standing debate in palaeoanthropology.
A study published this week in Nature focuses on homo rudolfensis, a hominin with a relatively flat face, which was first identified from a single large skull in 1972. Several other big-skulled fossils have been attributed to the species since then, but none has included both a face and a lower jaw. This has been problematic: in palaeoanthropology, faces and jaws function like fingerprints for identifying a specimen as a particular species (which is indicated by the second word in a Linnaean title, such as ‘rudolfensis’), as opposed to the broader grouping of genus (the first word, as in ‘ homo’).

Without complete skulls, it has been difficult to reach a consensus on whether specimens attributed to H. rudolfensis are genuinely members of a distinct species, or actually belong to other homo species that lived around the same time, such as homo habilis or  homo erectus. Understanding how many different homo species there were, and whether they lived concurrently, would help to determine whether the history of the human lineage saw fierce competition between multiple hominins, or a steady succession from one species to another.
But the latest result has dissipated much of this uncertainty. It concerns three fossils — two lower jaws and a juvenile’s lower face — that were found in a desert area called Koobi Fora in northern Kenya. The team that pulled them out of the ground, led by Meave Leakey, a palaeontologist at the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, describes how the dental arcade, the arch created by the teeth at the front of the mouth, is nearly rectangular, just like the palate structure of the 1972 skull. By contrast, the average modern human mouth has a curved dental arcade.
Further evidence comes from the juvenile’s face, which tellingly has cheek bones joining the palate quite far forward. “It was such an extended excitement as the juvenile face slowly emerged from the encasing rock, and its similarity to the 1972 specimen became so striking,” recalls Leakey.

NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Named Curiosity Beside Martian Mountain

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PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation. (from nasa.gov)

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.

“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars. Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars — or if the planet can sustain life in the future,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030’s, and today’s landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal.”

Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.

“The Seven Minutes of Terror has turned into the Seven Minutes of Triumph,” said NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld. “My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission’s team.”

Curiosity returned its first view of Mars, a wide-angle scene of rocky ground near the front of the rover. More images are anticipated in the next several days as the mission blends observations of the landing site with activities to configure the rover for work and check the performance of its instruments and mechanisms.

“Our Curiosity is talking to us from the surface of Mars,” said MSL Project Manager Peter Theisinger of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The landing takes us past the most hazardous moments for this project, and begins a new and exciting mission to pursue its scientific objectives.”

Confirmation of Curiosity’s successful landing came in communications relayed by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter and received by the Canberra, Australia, antenna station of NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance. The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater’s interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

The mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information on the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity And http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .