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...godlike role in creating. Thanks to a unique collaboration between Minnesota Zoo, China's State Forestry Administration (SFA), and a Bangkok-based environmental financier called International Consultancy Europe (ICE), a plan is under way to reintroduce the South China tiger, the rarest of the world's five surviving subspecies, back into its natural habitat. In this Year of the Tiger, the project has secured $3 million to restore a 250,000-acre (100,000 hectare) nature reserve straddling the borders of Hubei and Hunan provinces. (Read "No Valentine? Celebrate the Year of Tiger Instead...
...will be challenging. Derived from just six animals - two male, four female - caught between 1958 and 1970, they are so inbred that they are virtually brothers and sisters. But, Tilson adds, "China is an economic juggernaut, a military powerhouse. As part of that portfolio they need to bring back the icon of Asian wilderness. And that's the tiger." (See "Saving the World's Endangered Species...
...Back to the Future In half a century, the wild South China tiger population in China has been reduced from perhaps 4,000 to - Beijing disputes this - none. During Mao Zedong's time they were considered a pest and extermination campaigns were launched against them. Also taking a toll were loss of habitat, declining prey numbers and, as the economy took off, growing demand from traditional Chinese medicine for every part of the animal: whiskers, penis, bone, even feces...
...used to skeptics. "Don't you read the newspapers?" he was asked by an outraged prospective donor in the U.S. "The goddamn Chinese eat their tigers and put them into medicine." But Tilson is convinced that China's economic and human resources make it uniquely placed to put tigers back in the wild. The South China project could help revolutionize Chinese attitudes to endangered species and kick-start other attempts to revitalize biodiversity. "China is at a tipping point in its conservation history," he says...
...extend their reach overseas, al-Shabab's leaders in Somalia are thought to circle back to the diaspora, looking for those who can be recruited to extremism. The FBI is tracking more than a dozen Somali Americans who disappeared from their homes and are suspected of joining al-Shabab, and in November, 14 Minnesota men with connections to Somalia were charged with offenses like aiding a terrorist organization; four have pleaded guilty. In August, Australian police arrested five men from the Somali community in Melbourne on suspicion of plotting to attack an army barracks outside Sydney. The September call...