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Concerns over environmental problems spoiling Beijing's Olympiad have usually centered on the city's air quality, but a new threat to the Games has materialized in the sea. The waters off the coastal city of Qingdao, the venue for the Olympic sailing events, have become choked with thick, green algae. The bloom snakes along the shore and covers a third of the Olympic course, according to the state-run Xinhua News Service - and the muck is making life difficult for sailors and windsurfers who have come to train ahead of their August events. For Qingdao, a former German concession...
...More than 10,000 troops and close to 100,000 volunteers have been deployed to battle the algae, says Gao Zhenhui, director of the State Oceanic Administration's North China Sea Environmental Monitoring Center in Qingdao. "At first we didn't realize how big it would be," Gao says. "We didn't think it would happen so fast." Last June, Qingdao saw an algae blooms that covered 27 square miles, and a second one in September covered three square miles. But those are dwarfed by the current algae bloom, which covers 154 square miles...
...Africans in Europe. But the distinction between an illegal job seeker and a person seeking sanctuary from war and repression may not be one governments are willing to make, given that so many countries are already skittish over immigration. Last year alone, 20,000 people arrived in Italy by sea, most of them on rickety vessels from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa; about half that number will seek asylum in the E.U. With anti-immigrant sentiment growing, the European Parliament this week passed tough new common immigration guidelines that allow E.U. countries to hold illegal migrants...
...standing shoulder to shoulder in the Gaza surf, as if gathered for prayer. One or two men would wade furiously forward and cast their nets in a wide, swooping arc, and drag them back to shore; not once, in an hour, did they catch a single fish. The sea around Gaza is empty; factories are closed, and over 80% of the territory's 1.5 million residents live on meager food handouts from U.N. relief agencies...
...enhance the rapid development of algae in the water. When the algae die and decompose, the process sucks all the oxygen out of the surrounding waters, leading to a hypoxic event - better known as a "dead zone." The water becomes as barren as the surface of the moon. What sea life that can flee the zone does so; what can't, dies...