Reports

Archaeologists have unearthed a colossal statue of powerful pharaoh Amenhotep III at his 3,400-year-old mortuary temple in southern Egyptian city of Luxor. It is one of the largest of its kind to be discovered by the country's antiquities authority. The 13 metre tall statue of Amenhotep III, consisting of seven large quartzite blocks, was one of a pair that flanked the northern entrance to the grand funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile that is currently the focus of a major excavation...

Swan. Zebra. Tiger. Parrot. Giraffe. Cheetah. No, one is not alluding to wildlife conservation of any kind. Nor, for that matter, is this article about a visit to the nearest zoo or a lesson in fauna. It is instead about the infamous second-generation (2G) telecommunications spectrum scam. Only, that these were prefixes used by promoters of companies to conjure up new players and participants in a frantic bid to bag lucrative telecom licences. That's the really 'wild' aspect of the issuance of...

The ten most at-risk forested hotspots around the world have have lost 90 per cent or more of their original habitat. Each harbours at least 1500 endemic plant species - species found nowhere else in the world. If these forests are lost, says Conservation International, those endemic species are also lost forever. To mark launch of the International Year of Forests on Wednesday, Conservation International has highlighted the ten most at-risk forested hotspots around the world. These forests...

The International Year of Forests 2011 is being officially launched today with the Nagoya ABS Protocol opening for signature by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Today is also World Wetlands Day, and the 40th anniversary of the Convention on Wetlands. This year the theme is “Forests for Water and Wetlands”. The 'Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological...

One year after the death of the last member of the Bo tribe of the Andaman Islands, Survival International has warned that the neighbouring Jarawa tribe is also in danger. Boa Sr, the last of the Bo, died last January aged around 85. The Jarawa tribe number 365 people, and fiercely resisted contact with outsiders until 1998. Now an illegal road cuts through the Jarawa’s rainforest, and poachers and tourists invade their land. Poachers steal the animals the Jarawa need to survive and, like the...

A tiny bird that weighs less than 100 grams has completed a 27,000 km round trip migration for the second time. This is the first time a wader has been tracked with a geolocator on its complete migration in successive years. The bird in question was a ruddy turnstone ( Arenaria interpres), a small wader weighing less than 100 grams which spends the (austral) summer months on many of the beaches around Australia. They are one of the family of waders that migrate huge distances to Siberia in...

Women who win the Best Actress Oscar are at a higher risk of divorce than nominees who do not win. On the other hand, Best Actor winners do not experience an increase in the risk of divorce after an Oscar, a new study insists. Tiziana Casciaro, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, studied the marital graphs of 751 nominees in the best actor and actress categories of the Academy Awards between1936 to 2010. The results, which have been published...

A four-member UNESCO-IUCN monitoring team is visiting Manas National Park in Assam for an on-the-spot assessment if the "danger" tag attached to the World Heritage Site should be removed. The outcome of the five-day visit will play an important role at the 35th World Heritage Committee meeting in Bahrain during June when the issue will be discussed. The last time that a UNESCO team visited Manas was in 2008. Manas National Park is India’s only World Heritage Site on the Danger List. It was...

The tiger reserves of Asia could support more than 10,000 wild tigers – three times the current number – if they are managed as largescale landscapes that allow for connectivity between core breeding sites, a new paper from some of the world’s leading conservation scientists finds. The paper is the first assessment of the political commitment made by all 13 tiger range countries at November’s historic tiger summit to double the tiger population across Asia by 2022. “A Landscape-Based...

The international community is woefully lacking in courage and hiding behind "soft diplomacy" in confronting human rights abusers the globe over, a leading rights group has said in a 649-page world report released Monday. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2011, flayed world leaders and global institutions for "simply feigning serious participation" and "ongoing concern" for human rights, claiming that these "expected champions" use rhetoric as substitutes for concerted action. "The quest...