Word: leveler
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...Traill and his colleagues, after reviewing the most current data, found that a better rule would be 5,000 - meaning no fewer than 5,000 adult individuals are needed to keep a species safe from the threat of extinction. Dip below that level, and any sudden change - the loss of a valued habitat, a new disease - could wipe out a species before conservationists would have time to act. "Small populations have therefore reached a point of departure: away from the ability to adapt to changing environmental circumstances and toward inflexible vulnerability to those same changes," writes Traill. (Read "Extinction 'Gene...
Increasing species numbers, however, may not be possible. The main hurdle, not surprisingly, is politics. The needs of a real conservation effort may require a level of animal protection beyond what is politically possible. That puts conservationists in a bind. Do they push for the tighter levels of protection that might successfully preserve endangered species or do they accept what is politically feasible? "We suggest that most vulnerable species are not really being managed for viability," writes Traill. "Rather, conservation targets in most cases merely aim to maximize short-term [species] persistence and fit with complex political and financial realities...
...have seen what the government can do against the Tibetans and the Uighurs when they dare rise up and ask for greater autonomy. China has become an economic powerhouse, but one result is glaring inequalities between billionaires on one side and the millions of people below the poverty level. Maybe another revolution is brewing. Jean-Louis Desplat, SAINT-LO, FRANCE...
...government will have to follow quickly behind with infrastructure, schools, medical clinics and courts - key elements whose absence allowed the Taliban to flourish in the first place. There, too, a lesson can be taken from the Swat experience. Military officials in the Swat Valley recently released thousands of low-level Taliban captives into the custody of local authorities, who have neither the infrastructure to hold nor the facilities to try the militants...
...Honduras. Even so, many in the hemisphere have questioned Obama's wholehearted commitment to thwarting the coup and getting Zelaya reinstalled. A Latin-American diplomat close to the Zelaya-Micheletti talks says the acting leader's own aides showed him an e-mail last month from a high-level official in the U.S.'s OAS delegation concurring that Zelaya's return should not be a condition for approving the election. What's more, says the diplomat, the missive suggests that insisting on Zelaya's restoration has handed a victory to Chávez and other anti-U.S. leaders...