The Siamese Crocodile is one of the rarest and most endangered species in the world, with less than 200 of them remaining in the world. Plans for the construction of a dam in the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia is threatening the lives of one-fifth of this already struggling population. The construction of the Chay Areng Dam will do untold damage to this unspoilt region; threatening not only the Siamese crocodile, but several other species living in this valley. (more…)
Environmental conservation has always been a topic for lengthy discussions, but up until recent times, global warming and climate changes were vague subjects, with no hard proof. Not surprisingly, the previous lack of attention to these issues have created a very gloomy outlook on our future. So, considering all this, what could be the biggest contributor to climate changes through global warming? Transportation – the man-made iron horses, flying machines and sea monsters, so to speak.
The question we have now is ‘how green is our transportation?’ The majority of the world’s vehicles are fueled by oil (petrol, diesel and kerosene). Even if they rely on electricity, the stations used to generate this electricity use fossil fuels for power! Excluding vehicle manufacture, transportation is responsible for 14% of the artificially created greenhouse emissions, mostly carbondioxide.
Automobiles, trains and planes are all responsible for this problem, but cars are the highest impact-makers. They release approximately six times more carbondioxide than a plane and seven times more than sea vessels.
With drug and narcotic smuggling on the rise, it should definitely not come as a surprise to any of us that a Utah man was recently convicted of trying to smuggle African ‘Khat’ to the United States of America. He was held guilty of conspiring to import hundreds of pounds of this African drug to the mainland and got sentenced to 18 months behind bars for his effort.
Of course, we all think that he is pretty dumb, but that aside, how on earth did he think that we was going to get away with it? He was not even taking the time to smuggle it into the country but had imported it in the guise of ’spices’. Being an import item, it would have been subjected to a myriad number of tests including a visual inspection by the customs officials themselves.
khat is an African plant, whose green leaves, when chewed tend to give one a high and are categorized as a drug. Most of the people in east Africa chew Khat in one form or the other. The Utah man must have thought that there would be a great demand for this amongst the African immigrants in Utah and so decided to import it. The Khat was all chopped up and flown to the United States and from there to Utah by way of a container truck. The customs officials in Utah decided to take a closer look at this huge consignment of Spices and were shocked to discover that it was actually a drug shipment marked to the Holladay residence. It must have been really insulting to the customs officials in Salt lake city to have their intelligence underestimated by a person who thought that he could legally import drugs into this country.
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