WorldFailure

Nearly 3,000 wild great apes 'stolen' each year: UN
4 March 2013


A silverback gorilla male, walks in its enclosure at the Amneville zoo, eastern France on April 04, 2012.

AFP - Almost 3,000 great apes are killed or captured in the wild each year because of rampant illegal trade, according to a new UN report released Monday that voiced fears for their survival.

More than 22,000 great apes are estimated to have been lost to the illicit trade between 2005 and 2011, according to the study by the UN Environment Programme, which oversees the Great Apes Survival Partnership (Grasp).

"This trade is thriving and extremely dangerous to the long term survival of great apes," said Grasp coordinator Doug Cress, describing the illegal trade as "sophisticated, ingenious, well financed, well armed". "At this rate, apes will disappear very quickly," he said. Capturing a single chimpanzee alive can require killing 10 others, said Cress. "You cannot walk into a forest and just take one. You have to fight for it. You have to kill the other chimpanzees in the group," he told reporters on the sidelines of a major conference on endangered species in Bangkok. The fate of captured gorillas was even more bleak as they die quickly from stress, he added.

In Pakistan town, men have spoken: No women vote
5 May 2013
By REBECCA SANTANA


In this Monday, April 29, 2013, Ruksana Ali, an activist from the Association for Gender Awareness & Human Empowerment enlists names of women for the upcoming elections in Mateela village near Sargodha, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Rebecca Santana)

MATEELA, Pakistan (AP) -- For decades, not a single woman in this dusty Pakistani village surrounded by wheat fields and orange trees has voted.

And they aren't likely to in next week's parliamentary election either. The village's men have spoken. "It's the will of my husband," said one woman, Fatma Shamshed. "This is the decision of all the families."

Mateela is one of 564 out of the 64,000 polling districts across Pakistan where not a single woman voted in the country's 2008 election. The men from this village of roughly 9,000 people got together with other nearby communities to decide that their women would not vote on May 11 either.

Next week's election will bring a major first for democracy in Pakistan - the first time a civilian government has fulfilled its term and handed over power to another. But women still face an uphill battle to make their voices heard in the political process, as voters, candidates and in parliament, where they hold 22 percent of the seats in the lower house. Women represent only about 43 percent of the roughly 86 million registered voters, according to election commission data. In more conservative areas like Khyber Paktunkhwa province and Baluchistan, the percentage drops even further.