The UN’s cultural body has voiced alarm at the building of a giant crematorium within a fabled temple complex in Nepal, worried it will become an eyesore at one of the world’s holiest Hindu sites. …read more
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UNESCO is including the writings of Cuban Revolution leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara in its Memory of the World Register.
The documents include original manuscripts from “Che’s” youthful “Motorcycle Diaries” days, to his diary from the mountains of Bolivia where he was executed by that nation’s military in 1967.
They are now recognized as world heritage and will be protected and cared for with the help of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The Memory of the World Register comprises nearly 300 documents and collections from five continents. Guevara’s works are among 54 new additions this year.
His widow, daughter and son were on hand at a ceremony in Havana on Friday to celebrate the inclusion of the documents in the register.
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Australia pledged another Aus$5 million (US$4.6 million) to the fight against a predatory starfish devastating the iconic Great Barrier Reef Thursday, revealing 100,000 of the creatures had been wiped out so far.
Environment Minister Mark Butler said the new funding, on top of Aus$2.53 million already pledged, would support a programme of culling the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which is naturally-occurring but has proliferated due to pollution and run-off.
A major study of the reef’s health published last year revealed coral cover had halved over the past 27 years and attributed 42 percent of the damage to the starfish.
Canberra formally downgraded the reef’s health from moderate to poor last week, with cyclones and floods depleting water quality and reducing coral cover by 15 percent since 2009.
The government is under pressure to improve conditions on the reef, with UNESCO warning its World Heritage status will be declared at risk next year without action on rampant resources and coastal development in the region.
Butler said a special programme to reduce starfish numbers launched last year had seen 100,000 crown-of-thorns eradicated and the extra funding pledged Thursday would support a dedicated culling boat and divers.
“Importantly, it means crown-of-thorns starfish on high-value reefs are prevented from entering the next spawning season, and coral cover at high-value tourism sites, such as Lizard Island, has been maintained,” Butler said of the progress made so far.
He said action on the starfish, which consumes coral faster than it can be regenerated, was urgent given the broader threat of global warming to the reef.
“Due to climate change, the incidence of extreme weather events have had an incredibly detrimental effect on the reef,” Butler said.
“Also, since 1979 we’ve seen devastating coral bleaching occur across the reef nine times due to climate change and our warming sea waters, when there was no previous recorded occurrence.”
Butler said tourism and related reef activities injected Aus$6.2 billion into the economy every year, employing 120,000 people and it was one of the nation’s “most valuable assets”.
“We must ensure we protect the reef and the jobs it supports, which is why acting to halt climate change and further damage to the reef, by cutting carbon pollution, is imperative,” he said.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
FRANCHE-COMTE, France, July 13 (UPI) — The manager of a historic site in France said he had to kick out a number of baboons because of damage they were causing. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at UPI Odd News
The wife of the late Japanese painter Ikuo Hirayama concealed around $3 million worth of her husband’s assets to avoid a hefty tax bill, reports said Saturday.
Hirayama, a UNESCO goodwill ambassador who campaigned for the preservation of the world’s cultural heritage, died in 2009 leaving assets worth more than one billion yen ($10 million) mostly in the form of artwork, leading newspapers said.
Most of the assets were donated as non-taxable items to an art museum named after him, but his 87-year-old wife failed to report some 200 million yen in cash which was kept at home, the Yomiuri and the Asahi newspapers said, citing unnamed sources.
She also reported the value of copyrights inherited from her husband at around 100 million yen less than the real amount, the reports said.
She was forced to pay 150 million yen in back taxes and penalties, the reports said.
Hirayama was known for his efforts to preserve cultural treasures such as the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia, China’s Mogao Caves and Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhist monuments, which were blown up in 2001 by the Taliban.
He was first recognised widely for his 1959 work “Bukkyo Denrai”, depicting an ancient Buddhist monk who carried the religion from India to China.
Hirayama created a series of Buddhist-themed paintings of landscapes and ancient ruins on his frequent trips to sites along the ancient Silk Road.
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An air raid on Syria’s famed Krak des Chevaliers castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has damaged one of the fortress’s towers, footage shot by activists showed Saturday.
Several videos posted online showed at least one air strike on Friday against the castle in central Homs province, where fighting is raging between government troops and rebel forces.
The footage shows a huge blast as a tower of the Crusader castle, which is built on a hill, appears to take a direct hit, throwing up large clouds of smoke and scattering debris in the air.
A separate video filmed inside the fortress purports to show some of the damage caused by the air strike, including a gaping hole in the ceiling and a pile of rubble below.
“God is great. This is the destruction caused by MiG air strike on the Krak des Chevaliers,” says the activist filming the damage.
“Look at the this, oh world. This is Bashar al-Assad bombing the Krak des Chevaliers,” he adds of Syria’s embattled president whom rebel forces are trying to topple.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a watchdog group, could not confirm direct hits on the castle, but said there were reports of three air strikes in the area on Friday.
The raids came after rebels apparently using the Krak des Chevaliers as a base attacked an Alawite village called Qumayri, killing several people, Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
Fighting in and around the fortress has been reported throughout the conflict, which began with anti-government protests in March 2011 and evolved into an armed uprising after crackdowns on demonstrations.
The Krak des Chevaliers was built between 1142 and 1271, according to UNESCO, and along with the adjoining Qalat Salah el-Din fortress, is considered one of the best preserved Crusader castles in existence.
It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 2006, and is one of six sites in Syria designated as such.
In 2013, UNESCO decided to add all six of Syria’s World Heritage sites to its World Heritage in Danger list, reflecting concerns that serious damage was being inflicted on the areas as the country’s conflict continues.
The other sites include the Old Cities of Damascus and Aleppo and the ruins at ancient Palmyra.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, according to the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists, doctors and lawyers on the ground.
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A Chinese vessel that ran into a protected coral reef in the southwestern Philippines held evidence of even more environmental destruction inside: more than 22,000 pounds of meat from a protected species, the pangolin or scaly anteater.
The steel-hulled vessel hit an atoll on April 8 at the Tubbataha National Marine Park, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site on Palawan island. Coast guard spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Armand Balilo said Monday that some 400 boxes, each containing 25 to 30 kilograms of frozen pangolins, were discovered during a second inspection of the boat Saturday.
The World Wide Fund for Nature Philippines (WWF-Philippines) said the Chinese vessel F/N Min Long Yu could have been carrying up to 2,000 of the toothless, insect-eating animals rolled up in the boxes, with their scales already removed.
“It is bad enough that the Chinese have illegally entered our seas, navigated without boat papers and crashed recklessly into a national marine park and World Heritage Site,” said WWF-Philippines chief executive officer Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan. “It is simply deplorable that they appear to be posing as fishermen to trade in illegal wildlife.”
The boat’s 12 Chinese crewmen are being detained on charges of poaching and attempted bribery, said Adelina Villena, the marine park’s lawyer. She said more charges are being prepared against them, including damaging the corals and violating the country’s wildlife law for being found in possession of the pangolin meat.
It is not yet clear which of the four Asian pangolin species the meat comes from. The International Union of Conservation of Nature lists two species as endangered: the Sunda, or Malayan, pangolin, and the Chinese pangolin. Two others, including the Philippine pangolin endemic to Palawan, are classified as near threatened.
The animals are protected in many Asian nations, and an international ban on their trade has been in effect since 2002, but illicit trade continues. The meat and scales of the pangolin fetch hundreds of dollars per kilogram in China, where many believe they cure various ailments.
The IUCN says rising demand for pangolins and lax laws are wiping out the toothless anteaters from their forest habitat in Southeast Asia.
Alex Marcaida, an officer of the government’s Palawan Council for Sustainable Development, Philippine authorities consider the Philippine pangolin threatened because of unabated illicit trade. He said the Chinese crewmen have said the pangolins came from Indonesia, but officials were still verifying the claim.
WWF-Philippines said the global illegal wildlife trade is estimated to yield at least $19 billion per year, comprising the fourth-largest illegal global trade after narcotics, product and currency counterfeiting and human trafficking. It said the risks are low compared with other crimes, and that high-level traders are rarely arrested, prosecuted or convicted.
The Philippine military quoted the fishermen as saying they accidentally wandered into Philippine waters from Malaysia. They were being detained in southwestern Puerto Princesa city, where Chinese consular officials visited them.
Tubbataha is a 239,700-acre marine sanctuary and popular diving destination 640 kilometers (400 miles) southwest of Manila. The massive reef already had been damaged by a U.S. Navy ship that
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/6lq5CFwi6NA/
George Corvington, a prominent Haitian historian best known for his exhaustive study of the Caribbean nation’s capital of Port-au-Prince, died Wednesday at age 88, a close friend said.
Fellow historian and longtime friend Georges Michel said that Corvington died peacefully in his sleep at his home in the capital he wrote so much about. Michel said Covington had recently spent a few weeks in the hospital and the cause of death was heart failure.
“He’s a giant that has fallen,” said Michel, who is also a physician. “He was the greatest living Haitian historian.”
Corvington’s eight-volume, French-language “Port-au-Prince Through the Ages” chronicled the political and social history of Port-au-Prince, from its founding under French colonial rule in 1749 to the departure of President Paul Magloire in 1956.
Born in Port-au-Prince, Corvington began writing in the 1970s, collecting thousands of books that eventually formed a seemingly unmatched library collection. In addition to his work about the capital, a hilly coastal city that eventually swelled to an estimated 3 million people, Corvington also wrote about the National Palace and National Cathedral, iconic buildings that were destroyed in the 2010 earthquake that devastated much of Port-au-Prince.
Corvington himself narrowly survived the earthquake that toppled thousands of shoddily made buildings. When the disaster struck in the late afternoon on Jan. 12, 2010, Corvington was trapped under the debris of his home for about an hour before neighbors rescued him. He was not injured.
After the quake, the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO issued a call to protect Haitian artifacts from being pillaged from the country’s destroyed historical sites, and helped Corvington salvage his own archives.
He was never married. Details about his survivors were not immediately available.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Singapore, one of the world’s most densely populated countries, is campaigning to get its 154-year-old Botanic Gardens declared a UNESCO world heritage site. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Workers in the southwestern Philippines have removed the last major part of a U.S. Navy minesweeper from a protected coral reef where it ran aground in January, and the damage will be assessed to determine the fine Washington will pay, officials said Sunday.
A crane lifted the 250-ton stern of the dismantled USS Guardian on Saturday from the reef, where it accidentally got stuck Jan. 17, officials said. The reef, designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO, the United Nations‘ cultural arm, is located in the Tubbataha National Marine Park in the Sulu Sea, about 400 miles southwest of Manila.
The doomed ship’s parts will be transported to a Navy facility in Sasebo, Japan, to determine which ones can be reused and which will be junked, Philippine coast guard Commodore Enrico Efren Evangelista said.
Workers were cleaning debris at the site, where American and Filipino experts this week will begin a final assessment of the reef damage, to be paid for by Washington. An initial estimate showed about 4,000 square meters (4,780 square yards) of coral reef was damaged by the ship grounding, according to Tubbataha park superintendent Angelique Songco. She said it was unlikely the estimate would change significantly.
Songco said the fine would be about 24,000 pesos ($600) per square meter, so the U.S. could be facing a bill of more than $2 million.
The fine will go to a fund for the upkeep of the reef, Songco said, adding that Filipino and U.S. scientists will inspect the reef this week to determine the best way to “rehabilitate” the damaged parts. One option is to let the reef heal by itself, which would take a long time but be less complicated. Another option is to carry out some “repairs” to the reef, which would be more costly and complicated, she said.
Songco said her agency did not have plans to pursue charges against U.S. authorities over the incident.
Asked if the Philippine government would press charges against U.S. Navy officials, Philippine Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr., a spokesman for President Benigno Aquino III, did not reply directly, but said, “There must be accountability and we will enforce our existing laws.”
The warship’s removal closes an embarrassing episode as Washington reasserts its presence in Asia amid China‘s rise. The Navy and the U.S. ambassador to Manila, Harry K. Thomas, have both apologized for the grounding and promised to cooperate with America’s longtime Asian ally.
“As we have stated in the past, we regret this incident and the United States is prepared to pay compensation for the damage to the reef,” the U.S. Embassy said in a statement, adding that it was cooperating with a Philippine government investigation of the incident.
A separate U.S. government investigation on the cause of the grounding has not yet been completed, the embassy said.
Aquino has said that the U.S. Navy must explain how the ship got off course, and that the Navy will face fines for damaging the environment.
The Guardian was en route to Indonesia after making a rest and refueling stop in Subic Bay, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
By hnn
As the Syrian crisis enters its third year, an end to the violence in the country is nowhere to be seen. The world has become accustomed to rising death tolls and reports of shelling and destruction. However, another threat looms in Syria, and this time it is targeting its cultural heritage.
Palmyra, one of the oldest cities in the country, has been subjected to intermittent shelling by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
The ruins of the city, which is one of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites, date back thousands of years. “Bombs and rockets come in all directions,” eyewitnesses said.
Assad forces have struck the Roman Temple of Bel – built in 43 A.C. – and damaged its northern wall, eyewitnesses said, adding portions and stones of the wall have been destroyed….
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
By hnn
Crete is still pushing for Knossos to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is now preparing a new folder titled Minoan civilization, which will include the most important monuments on the island, such as Phaistos, Zakros and the archaeological site of Malia, with Knossos dominating the list.
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
In France, eating is supposed to be an art. Foodies from around the globe flock to the world’s gastronomic center to discover the true meaning of fine dining — a convivial sharing of dishes, lovingly prepared, which capture the imagination, the taste buds and the essence of the land.
Enter reality.
The Europe-wide uproar over horse meat being sold as beef has exposed a labyrinthine network of companies and countries that trade the meat used in packaged meals. And even the French, it appears, head to the microwave at night after work to zap frozen meals created in far-off factories.
Up to 41 percent of French expenditures for meals go to factory-prepared dishes and frozen products, France‘s national statistics agency said in a 2008 report.
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote 165 years ago in his treatise on taste.
Today, the French are caught in a contradiction: The pleasure of eating good food still defines them but their busy lives increasingly determine what they eat.
France set the standards long ago and upholds them today with coveted Michelin stars for top chefs and annual “taste weeks” devoted to cultivating a discerning palate for its children. In 2010, the French gastronomic meal was declared an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” by UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural arm.
Deep pockets will still get diners a quality meal at even no-star restaurants, but at home or at work it’s another story. Gone are the two-hour lunches. Traditional bakeries stand in as sandwich shops while supermarkets provide industrially-prepared meals.
“The French need prepared dishes because women work. We don’t have time to cook. It’s really a change in lifestyle” that began in the 1970s, said Pascale Hebel, director of the consumer affairs department at CREDOC, a research center.
Hebel said France has the highest proportion of households in Europe with working parents and “these markets are growing.”
“When you have an adolescent at home, you have to leave something to eat, so you leave a prepared dish,” she said.
Indeed, the youth of France are propelling this trend, …read more
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Syria‘s antiquities chief is warning of rampant trafficking in artifacts from his country and appealing for U.N. help in halting the illicit trade that flourished during the nearly 23-month-long civil war.
Maamoun Abdulkarim says he would like for the Security Council to issue a resolution that would “ban trade” in stolen antiquities from Syria. He cites steps taken by the U.N. to protect Iraq‘s cultural heritage as an example.
Abdulkarim says Syria‘s cultural heritage must be preserved without taking political sides in the conflict.
He spoke Wednesday at a UNESCO-sponsored workshop in Amman, Jordan. The gathering brought together regional antiquities directors, customs and police officials, as well as international protection agencies.
Abdulkarim praised Jordanian police for seizing smuggled Syrian artifacts and called on other neighboring countries to tighten controls.
By hnn
TIMBUKTU, Mali — For eight days after the Islamists set fire to one of the world’s most precious collections of ancient manuscripts, the alarm inside the building blared. It was an eerie, repetitive beeping, a cry from the innards of the injured library that echoed around the world.
The al-Qaida-linked extremists who ransacked the institute wanted to deal a final blow to Mali, whose northern half they had held for 10 months before retreating in the face of a French-led military advance. They also wanted to deal a blow to the world, especially France, whose capital houses the headquarters of UNESCO, the organization which recognized and elevated Timbuktu’s monuments to its list of World Heritage sites….
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
For eight days after the Islamists set fire to one of the world’s most precious collections of ancient manuscripts, the alarm inside the building housing the repository blared. It was an eerie, repetitive beeping, a cry from the innards of the injured library that echoed around the world.
The al-Qaida-linked extremists who ransacked the institute wanted to deal a final blow to Mali, whose northern half they had held for 10 months before retreating in the face of a French-led military advance. They also wanted to deal a blow to the world, especially France, whose capital houses the headquarters of UNESCO, the organization which recognized and elevated Timbuktu’s monuments to its list of World Heritage sites.
So as they left, they torched the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, aiming to destroy a heritage of 30,000 manuscripts that date back to the 13th century.
“These manuscripts are our identity,” said Abdoulaye Cisse, the library’s acting director. “It’s through these manuscripts that we have been able to reconstruct our own history, the history of Africa . People think that our history is only oral, not written. What proves that we had a written history are these documents.”
The first people who spotted the column of black smoke on Jan. 23 were the residents whose homes surround the library, and they ran to tell the center’s employees. The bookbinders, manuscript restorers and security guards who work for the institute broke down and cried.
Just about the only person who didn’t was Cisse, the acting director, who for months had harbored a secret. Starting last year, he and a handful of associates had conspired to save the documents so crucial to this 1,000-year-old town.
In April, when the rebels preaching a radical version of Islam first rolled into this city swirling with sand, the institute was in the process of moving its collection into a new, state-of-the-art building. The fighters commandeered the new center, turning it into a dormitory for one of their units of foreign fighters, Cisse said. They didn’t realize only about 2,000 manuscripts had been moved there, the bulk of the collection remaining at the old library, he said.
The Islamists came in, as they did in Afghanistan, with their own, severe interpretation of Islam, intent on rooting out what they saw as the veneration of idols instead of the pure worship of Allah. During their 10-month-rule, they eviscerated much of the identity of this storied city, starting with the mausoleums of their saints, which were reduced to rubble.
The turbaned fighters made women hide their faces and blotted out their images on billboards. They closed hair salons, banned makeup and forbade the music for which Mali is known.
Their final act before leaving was to go through the exhibition room in the institute, as well as the whitewashed laboratory used to restore the age-old parchments. They grabbed the books they found and burned them.
However, they didn’t bother searching the old building, where an elderly man named Abba Alhadi has spent 40 of his 72 years on earth taking care of rare manuscripts. The illiterate old man, who walks with a cane and looks like a character from the Bible, was the perfect foil for the Islamists. They wrongly assumed that the city’s European-educated elite would be the ones trying to save the manuscripts, he said.
So last August, Alhadi began stuffing the thousands of books into empty rice and millet sacks.
At night, he loaded the millet sacks onto the type of trolley used to cart boxes of vegetables to the market. He pushed them across town and piled them into a lorry and onto the backs of motorcycles, which drove them to the banks of the Niger River.
From there, they floated down to the central Malian town of Mopti in a pinasse, a narrow, canoe-like boat. Then cars drove them from Mopti, the first government-controlled town, to Mali‘s capital, Bamako, over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from here.
“I have spent my life protecting these manuscripts. This has been my life’s work. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I could no longer protect them here,” said Alhadi. “It hurt me deeply to see them go, but I took strength knowing that they were being sent to a safe place.”
It took two weeks in all to spirit out the bulk of the collection, around 28,000 texts housed in the old building covering the subjects of theology, astronomy, geography and more.
There was nothing they could do, however, for the 2,000 documents that had already been transferred to the new library, to its exhibition and restoration rooms, and to a basement vault. Cisse took solace knowing that most of the texts in the new library had been digitized.
Even so, when his staff came to tell him about the fire, he felt a constriction in his chest.
The new library is housed inside a modern building, whose sheer walls are made to resemble the mud-walled homes of Timbuktu. Cisse braved his fear to slip through the back gate on the morning of Jan. 24.
The alarm was still screaming. The empty manuscript boxes were strewn on the ground outside in the brick courtyard. All that was left of the books was a soft, feathery ash.
Cisse then entered the library. The glass cases in the exhibit room were empty. So was the manuscript restoration lab, its white tables blanketed in dust. The manuscripts left out were gone.
But the librarian knew the bulk of the books was in a storage room in the basement. With the alarm still screaming, he walked down the flight of pitch-black stairs.
The room had been locked shut. And he was too afraid to open it, because the mayor of Timbuktu had warned residents that the retreating rebels had mined the town and booby-trapped strategic buildings.
So he waited.
On Jan. 28, a column of more than 600 French troops rolled into the city.
The same day, they came to inspect the institute. They spraypainted in pink the word “OK” in front of each room they cleared, working their way to the basement. They pummeled the locked door. When the door slapped open, Cisse felt as if his chest was about to explode.
They beamed a flashlight into the darkness. In the pools of light, he made out the little bundles of parchments sitting on the rafters. They were where they had left them nearly a year ago, in a room the Islamists had never discovered.
The director-general of UNESCO toured the damaged library this weekend, alongside French President Francois Hollande, who made a triumphant visit to Timbuktu. She described the manuscripts as a global treasure. “They are part of our world heritage,” said Irina Bokova. “They are important for all of Africa, as well as for all of the world.”
Cisse estimates that what was lost in the end is less than 5 percent of the Ahmed Baba collection. Which texts were burned is not yet known.
He stresses that all the manuscripts, which date back over 700 years, are irreplaceable. They are hand-written in a variety of scripts, and include ornate illustrations embedded within the text.
The collection is itself only a portion of the estimated 101,820 manuscripts stored in private libraries here, the product of the confluence of caravan routes which passed through Timbuktu and fostered an extensive trading network, including in books. Among the most valuable are the Tarikh al-Sudan and the Tarikh al-Fattash, chronicles which describe life in Timbuktu during the Songhai empire in the 16th century.
“We lost a lot of our riches. But we were also able to save a great deal of our riches, and for that I am overcome with joy,” Cisse said. “These manuscripts represent who we are…. I saved these books in the name of Timbuktu first, because I am from Timbuktu. . Then I did it for my country. And also for all of humanity. Because knowledge is for all of humanity.”
___
Rukmini Callimachi can be reached at www.twitter.com/rcallimachi.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
The Carnival celebrations in this Andean mining city already rival Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro for color and culture, if not for size. Now Oruro has erected a huge statue of the Virgin Mary that’s a little taller than Rio’s famed Christ the Redeemer.
Oruro formally dedicated the new statue Friday as it kicked off its Carnival celebrations, which have been recognized as part of the patrimony of humanity by UNESCO.
The Virgin of Socavon is almost 150 feet (45 meters) high — a shade shorter than New York’s Statue of Liberty and 23 feet (seven meters) higher than Rio’s image of Christ. It’s built of cement, iron and fiberglass to withstand the fierce winds of the high plain.
“If Rio has its Christ and its Carnival, Oruro has it’s Carnival, and now it has the Virgin. We’re complete,” said Virginia Barrios, a neighborhood leader.
She said construction of the statue cost $1.2 million and took four years.
During Carnival each year, more than 30,000 people dance in procession through the streets, some in elaborate costumes, and brass bands blare. They honor the Virgin of Socavon, the patron saint of the city of roughly 250,000 people.
President Evo Morales, who was a musician in Oruro in his youth, participated in the inauguration of the statue and Pope Benedict XVI sent a message of blessing.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Australia insisted Friday that protecting the Great Barrier Reef was a top priority, but conservationists WWF said not enough had been done to prevent UNESCO deeming it a world heritage site “in danger”.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Timbuktu, the fabled desert city where retreating Muslim extremists destroyed ancient Arab manuscripts, was a center of Islamic learning hundreds of years before Columbus landed in the Americas.
It is not known how many of the priceless documents were destroyed by al Qaida-linked fighters who set ablaze a state-of-the-art library built with South African funding to conserve the brittle, camel-hide bound manuscripts from the harshness of the Sahara Desert climate and preserve them so researchers can study them. News of the destruction came Monday from the mayor of Timbuktu. With its Islamic treasures and centuries-old mud-walled buildings including an iconic mosque, Timbuktu is a U.N.-designated World Heritage Site.
The damage caused by the fleeing Islamists was limited, but irreplaceable treasures were lost.
Most of the manuscripts, which are as many as 900 years old, were gathered between the 1980s and 2000 from all over Mali for the Ahmed Baba Institute for Higher Learning and Islamic Research, which moved into its new home in 2009. The library held about 30,000 manuscripts of which only about one third had been catalogued, according to its Web site. The world may never know what it has lost.
The manuscripts cover subjects ranging from science, astrology and medicine to history, theology, grammar and geography. All are in Arabic script, in the Arabic language and African languages.
They date back to the late 12th century, the start of a 300-year golden age for Timbuktu as a spiritual and intellectual capital for the propagation of Islam on the continent.
Michael Covitt, chairman of the Malian Manuscript Foundation, called them “the most important find since the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Tens of thousands more manuscripts — no one knows how many — were kept at other libraries and private homes in Timbuktu. Some are believed to have been secreted against the Islamist fighters, who began their desecration of the city by systematically razing the 15th-century mausoleums of several Sufi saints in July. Among the tombs they destroyed is that of Sidi Mahmoudou, a saint who died in 955, according to a UNESCO website.
The International Criminal Court at The Hague has described the destruction of Timbuktu’s heritage as a possible war crime. Timbuktu has been attacked and conquered in the past, most recently in 1591 by Moroccan troops who sacked the city and burned libraries. But the city recovered and gained fame as a place where people from different races and creeds could live together harmoniously.
Even before Europeans landed in the Americas, Timbuktu had a population of 30,000.
The nomadic Tuareg tribe first set up their camel-skin and palm-mat tents there in the dry season, attracted by its location where the Niger River flows toward the southern brink of the Sahara Desert, prompting some to call it the point where “the camel meets the canoe.” The tents gave way to sun-dried terracotta-colored mud brick buildings built in the Moorish style as traders, medical doctors, clerics, artists, poets and others settled there.
The city is on an old caravan route where Arab traders brought salt and other goods that reached North Africa’s Mediterranean shores and traded it in Timbuktu for gold and Islamic books. It served as a major crossroads between Africa’s Arab north and black West Africa, bringing together black Africans, Berbers, Arabs and the Tuareg people that consider Timbuktu their town. Its dynamism has been overlooked by the English expression “from here to Timbuktu” — conjuring up an end-of-the-earth remoteness.
Islamist extremists started operating in northern Mali in 2011, and three Europeans were taken hostage from a Timbuktu restaurant in November that year, frightening away tourists. In April 2012, Tuareg nationalist rebels seized control of Timbuktu from government troops. A day later Islamist insurgents elbowed their way into the city. They banned music, insisted women cover themselves and began carrying out public executions and amputations.
On Tuesday, Timbuktu was in control of French and Malian troops, including some 250 French paratroopers dropped from the sky. The extremists melted into the desert without firing a shot. Townspeople were jubilant at the city’s liberation from intolerant Islamist extremists.
___
Faul reported from Johannesburg
On the Web:
www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Islamist extremists torched a library containing historic manuscripts in Timbuktu, the mayor said Monday, as French and Malian forces closed in on Mali‘s fabled desert city.
Ousmane Halle said he heard about the burnings early Monday.
“It’s truly alarming that this has happened,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from Mali‘s capital, Bamako, on Monday. “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts. The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.”
He said he did not have details or whether the rebels were still in the town.
Ground forces backed by French paratroopers and helicopters took control of Timbuktu’s airport and the roads leading to the town in an overnight operation, a French military official said Monday. It marked the latest success in the two-week-old French mission to oust radical Islamists from the northern half of Mali, which they seized more than nine months ago.
French Col. Thierry Burkhard, the chief military spokesman in Paris, said Monday that the town’s airport was taken without firing a shot.
“There was an operation on Timbuktu last night that allowed us to control access to the town,” he said Monday. “It’s up to Malian forces to retake the town.”
The Timbuktu operation comes a day after the French announced they had seized the airport and a key bridge in a city east of Timbuktu, Gao, one of the other northern provincial capitals that had been under the grip of radical Islamists.
The French and Malian forces so far have met little resistance from the Islamists, who seized northern Mali in the wake of a military coup in the distant capital of Bamako, in southern Mali.
Timbuktu, which lies on an ancient caravan route, has entranced travelers for centuries, is some 620 miles northeast of Bamako. During their rule, the militants have systematically destroyed UNESCO World Heritage sites in Timbuktu.
A spokesman for the Al Qaeda-linked militants has said that the ancient tombs of Sufi saints were destroyed because they contravened Islam, encouraging Muslims to venerate saints instead of God.
Among the tombs they destroyed is that of Sidi Mahmoudou, a saint who died in 955, according to the UNESCO website.
Timbuktu, long a hub of Islamic learning, is also home to some 20,000 manuscripts, some dating back as far as the 12th century. Owners have succeeded in removing some of the manuscripts from Timbuktu to save them, while others have been carefully hidden away from the Islamists.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
