Word: bans
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...ivory wars continued until 1989, when countries at the global Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) voted to ban all trade in elephant ivory. With trade choked off, demand for ivory plummeted; African governments, with Western aid, cracked down on remaining poachers. Elephant populations in Africa began to rebound slowly. (See 10 species nearing extinction...
Although the elephant-trade ban has been in place since 1989, real protection for the threatened species ended in 1997. That's when pro-ivory trade forces pushed through a decision in CITES that allowed a one-time exception to the ban on sales of stockpiled ivory. The idea was that by allowing a few legal sales, pressure for ivory goods would diminish, mostly in richer Asian nations, and therefore reduce the demand for poaching. If poaching was an illegal drug, stockpile sales were the methadone. (See pictures of India's contraband wildlife...
...help that in 2007 CITES gave South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe permission to sell 110 tons of stockpiled ivory to China and Japan. The E.U. allowed that sale on the condition that there would be a nine-year moratorium on future stockpile sales, but CITES applied that ban only to those four countries - leaving Tanzania and Zambia open to request their own sales. "We keep moving the goalposts," says Steven Broad, the executive director of TRAFFIC International, which monitors wildlife trade. (See pictures of wildlife and ecosystems endangered by global warming...
...woman’s existence. By and large, those who wear it are victims," said Fadela Amara, France’s Secretary of Urban Policy, and a Muslim woman herself. This is the going attitude toward the Islamic veil in France these days. Since 2004, French girls have been banned from wearing headscarves in state schools, and in January of this year, a French parliamentary commission recommended a partial ban on women wearing Islamic face veils in government offices, schools, on public transportation, and in hospitals. Such a ban would be discriminatory toward Muslim culture, and the implications...
...commission was not only worried about women’s rights when they proposed the veil-ban, they were also worried about the growth of Islamic radicalism within France. The same parliamentary commission recommended that foreign women exhibiting such signs of "radicalness" (presumably, like a veil) be denied residency, asylum, and citizenship. France has five million Muslims, more than any other country in Western Europe, and has had problems assimilating immigrants in the past. Therefore, fears of a London subway bombings-style act of violence by disenchanted Muslim youth are resonant Again, there is some truth to the idea that...