6 y/o Boy with NO Legs & 1 Arm Swims Better Than Most
blog.al.com — There's really no other way to put this but "GABE IS THE MAN!"
click here for the amazing story: 6 y/o Boy with NO Legs & 1 Arm Swims Better Than Most
Monday, July 12, 2010
Amazon river dolphins being slaughtered for bait
Photo By AP
The bright pink color gives them a striking appearance in the muddy jungle waters. That Amazon river dolphins are also gentle and curious makes them easy targets for nets and harpoons as they swim fearlessly up to fishing boats.
Now, their carcasses are showing up in record numbers on riverbanks, their flesh torn away for fishing bait, causing researchers to warn of a growing threat to a species that has already disappeared in other parts of the world.
"The population of the river dolphins will collapse if these fishermen are not stopped from killing them," said Vera da Silva, the top aquatic mammals expert at the government's Institute of Amazonian Research. "We've been studying an area of 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) for 17 years, and of late the population is dropping 7 percent each year."
That translates to about 1,500 dolphins killed annually in the part of the Mamiraua Reserve of the western Amazon where da Silva studies the mammals.
Da Silva said researchers first began finding dolphin carcasses along riverbanks around the year 2000. They were obviously killed by human hands: sliced open and quartered, with their flesh cut away.
The killings are becoming more common, researchers and environmental agents say. Even the government acknowledges that there is a problem. It's already illegal to kill the dolphins without government permission -- as with all wild animals in the Amazon. But little is being done to stop it.
Less than five agents are tasked with protecting wildlife in a jungle region covering the western two-thirds of Amazonas state, which is more than twice the size of Texas, according to the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), the enforcement arm of the Environment Ministry.
"It's a matter of priority, and right now the government is focusing on deforestation," said Ibama's Andrey Silva. "The killings of these dolphins exists -- it's a fact."
The dolphins are attractive to anglers for their fatty flesh that is a highly effective bait for catching a type of catfish called piracatinga.
Consumption in neighboring Colombia is driving the slaughter. Some 884 tons of the fish came from Brazil in 2007, according to the Colombian Institute for Rural Development. That jumped to 1,430 tons in 2008 and spiked to 2,153 tons in 2009.
Simple economics exacerbates the problem: Killing dolphins is free, and their meat is valuable. Using the flesh from one carcass, fishermen can catch up to 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of piracatinga. According to da Silva and other researchers, they can sell the catfish for 50 cents per kilogram, translating into $550 for just a few nights' work -- about double Brazil's monthly minimum wage.
"It's attracting a lot of poor people to this region to kill the dolphins and make easy money," said Antonio Miguel Migueis, a dolphin researcher with the Federal University of Western Para since 2005.
So far it's impossible to quantify the exact impact fisherman are having on the river dolphins -- little research has been done to study the killings or even the overall population of the dolphins in the Amazon.
But activists warn that waiting for exhaustive studies could mean the dolphin population would be irreversibly devastated by the time the work is complete.
"This is most definitely a threat to the future of this river dolphin species," said Alison Wood, with the England-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. "This is a relatively new threat, but clearly an extremely serious one."
Migueis said he warned Ibama and other authorities numerous times about the dolphin slaughter, but his reports fell on deaf ears.
Growing up to 8 feet (2.5 meters) long and weighing as much as 400 pounds (180 kilograms), Amazon river dolphins are the largest of four species known to exist in South America and Asia.
Their genetic siblings have already died off elsewhere: The Yangzte river dolphin in China was declared functionally extinct in 2006, the victim of pollution, overfishing and increased boat traffic.
Meanwhile, the International Union of Conservation of Nature lists the Ganges river dolphin in India as endangered, and the Irrawaddy river dolphin in Bangladesh as vulnerable.
Scientists believe river dolphins likely arrived in the Amazon during the Middle Miocene era 16 million years ago, when ocean levels were high around the world, and the sea inundated what is now lush rain forest.
For centuries they have been revered by locals and protected by myth. According to one tale, the dolphins transform into handsome men and leave the water at night, seducing and impregnating local women before returning to the river. Many simply consider it bad luck to kill them, given their supposed magical attributes.
But today, the quick payoff is trumping legend and superstition.
"Killing the dolphins is a fast and easy way for the fisherman to make money. It costs nothing but time," Vera da Silva said. "It's ugly because these dolphins have a folkloric value in the Amazon, and all that is disappearing for the sake of using them as bait."
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Associated Press Writers Jessica Lleras in Bogota, Colombia, and Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
Pink Floyd's Gilmour and Waters Stun Crowd With Surprise Reunion
Photo courtesy of DavidGilmourBlog.com
For the first time in five years, the two driving forces behind Pink Floyd, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, reunited onstage at a benefit in England over the weekend. The unannounced team-up went down before the 200 attendees of the Hoping Foundation benefit in Oxfordshire, which raised money for young Palestinian refugees. The duo's four-song set included Phil Spector's "To Know Him Is To Love Him" (a Floyd sound-check staple according to the blog on Gilmour's website) and the band's classics "Wish You Were Here," "Comfortably Numb" and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2."
The Saturday night set marks the first time Waters and Gilmour have shared the stage since Pink Floyd's reunion performance at 2005's Live 8 in London. The duo's Hoping Foundation performance helped raise £350,000. At the benefit, Gilmour and Waters — who swapped his bass for an acoustic guitar — were joined by keyboardists Harry Waters and Jonjo Grisdale, drummer Andy Newmark, guitarist Chester Kamen and bassist Guy Pratt, who ironically replaced Waters in the Gilmour-led, Division Bell-era Pink Floyd.
As Rolling Stone previously reported, Waters asked Gilmour to join his 30th anniversary tour of The Wall this year, but his onetime bandmate declined. "David is completely uninterested," Waters said in May. "I could have probably gone for doing some more stuff, but he's not interested." Hopes for an official Pink Floyd reunion tour were mostly extinguished when keyboardist Richard Wright passed away in 2008 and Gilmour lamented, "No one can replace Richard Wright."
Even without Gilmour, Waters' The Wall tour is one of the few treks that has seemingly staved off the summer's concert industry struggles: While artists including Rihanna and the Jonas Brothers and tours like Lilith Fair and American Idols Live continue to cancel dates, the demand for The Wall 30th anniversary tour has led Waters to double, triple and, in some cases, quadruple the number of dates he's performing in certain markets.
Highest Paid Players in American Sports (Infographic)
mint.com — In this infographic, mint.com compare the salaries of the top-paid baseball, basketball, football, soccer and hockey players, take a look at salary caps and give you the average compensation for a professional in each of these sports.
This Bendable Bike Can Tie Itself to Any Post
We Inhabitat writers have had our fair share of bicycles and bicycle parts stolen on the mean streets of New York City. It seems these days you’ve got to lock everything down (even the brakes!) in order to keep your cycle intact. That often means buying more than one lock and disassembling your bike every time you leave it unguarded. Kevin Scott hopes to change all of that. He just unveiled his revolutionary bendable bike. That’s right, with the push of a lever the cycle becomes bike-Houdini and can wrap around any post making it easy to secure all its parts with just one lock. No more clunky chains? Sign us up!
Scott is a 21 year old graduate of The De Montfort University in the UK and was runner-up in the Business Design Centre New Designer of the Year Award. The bicycle he created uses a ratchet mechanism to allow it to be both rigid and bendable — but not all at once. Once you hop off the bike, you simply push a lever on the frame and the bike becomes flexible, so you can wrap it around your nearest pole or bike rack.
Scott decided to create the bike specifically so that all of its pieces could be secured easily with one lock. Scott’s bike is a prototype at this point but he’s looking to parlay this technology into a business venture. “I am now going to take this forward to produce a fully resolved solution and hopefully this will be a stepping stone into a career in the bike designing industry,” he says. Anyone looking for a new bike-genius might want to give this chap a call.
Via Gizmodo
New super awesome 'Machete' trailer arrives!
YEAH! A brand-new trailer for Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis' upcoming action adventure "Machete" is now online, and I highly recommend you check it out right after the jump. It totally rocks!
Danny Trejo plays the title character, a man who is orderd to kill a senator but ends up being double-crossed. Pissed about what went down, he gets back up to seek revenge against those who screwed him.
Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriquez, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson and Lindsay Lohan co-star. The film opens Sept. 3, 2010, and based on this trailer, it will kick ass and deliver superb action.
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