Namibia to cull over 700 animals to feed those affected by drought
Ismail Aslandag/Anadolu via Getty Images
(LONDON) — Namibia has announced that it will cull 723 wild animals to feed parts of its population as it grapples with its worst drought in 100 years.
In a statement, Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism said a total of 723 animals are set to be culled: 30 hippos, 60 buffalo, 50 impalas, 100 blue wildebeests, 300 zebras, 83 elephants, and 100 eland.
The culling will be done by “professional hunters and safari outfitters” in “national parks and communal area with sustainable game numbers,” where the population is exceeding available grazing and water resources, according to the announcement.
The culling is expected to produce tens of thousands of kilos of game meat, the announcement said, which the Namibian government’s drought relief program will allocate to people struggling with food insecurity.
“With the severe drought situation in the country, [human and wildlife] conflicts are expected to increase if no interventions are made,” according to the announcement. “This exercise in necessary and is in line with our constitutional mandate where our natural resources are used for the benefit of Namibian citizens.”
Additionally, the culling “will assist in reducing the negative impact of drought on the conservation of wild animals in both our national parks and communal areas,” the announcement said.
Nearly half of Namibia’s population – 48%, some 1.4 million people – is currently experiencing “acute food insecurity,” according to a July report from the United Nations.
“84% of Namibia’s food reserves are already exhausted, and nearly half of the population is expected to experience high levels of food insecurity between July and September,” said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the United Nations secretary-general, in a press briefing on August 23.
The animals that will be culled are located in Namibia’s Namib Naukluft, Mangetti, Bwabwata, Mudumu, and Nkasa Rupara national parks, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism announcement.
(WASHINGTON) — The suspects who plotted an attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month planned to kill “a huge number” of people, according to a CIA official.
CIA Deputy Director David Cohen spoke about the foiled terror attack at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Bethesda, Maryland, on Wednesday.
“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said at the summit. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”
“As a result, hundreds of lives, undoubtedly, were saved,” he added.
Three suspects — ages 17, 18 and 19 — have been arrested in connection with the plot. Intelligence officials said they were inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda, and that bomb-making materials were found in the 19-year-old Austrian citizen’s home.
Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, head of Austria’s Directorate of State Security and Intelligence, previously said the 19-year-old confessed to the plot under interrogation.
The suspect was “clearly radicalized in the direction of the Islamic State” and allegedly intended to kill himself and “as many people as possible” outside the concert venue using knives and homemade explosives, Haijawi-Pirchner said at a news conference shortly after the arrest.
Following the arrests, Swift canceled three sold-out concerts in Vienna, which more than 150,000 fans were expected to attend.
In an Instagram post after the canceled Eras Tour shows, Swift said it was “devastating” having to call off the Vienna tour dates.
“The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows,” Swift wrote
Swift thanked authorities for their work stopping the alleged attack.
“Thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives,” she wrote.
Swift wrapped up her European leg of the tour with several shows in London, amid increased security, earlier this month.
This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, acquired May 13, 2018, during winter at the South Pole of Mars, shows a carbon dioxide ice cap covering the region. As the sun returns in the spring, “spiders” begin to emerge from the landscape. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)
(NEW YORK) — Over two decades since NASA researchers first saw images of mysterious, spider-like formations across the southern hemisphere of Mars, the space agency announced it’s recreated the planet’s “spiders” here on Earth.
Dubbed “araneiform terrain,” the formations span over a half-mile long and have hundreds of branches that resemble spider legs, according to NASA.
Theories surrounding the Red Planet’s “spiders” date back to 2003, when researchers got a glimpse of the terrain via Mars orbiters, with many believing they are formed through carbon dioxide ice, which doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.
To confirm this hypothesis, researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California said they recreated the formation process in a simulated Mars environment that mimicked the planet’s air pressure and temperature.
The simulation chamber — called the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE for short — uses liquid nitrogen to reach temperatures as low as minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA.
Results from the five-year study were published this month in The Planetary Science Journal.
“The spiders are strange, beautiful geologic features in their own right,” JPL researcher Lauren Mc Keown said in a Sept. 11 press release. “These experiments will help tune our models for how they form.”
Researchers found that when sunlight heats soil underneath slabs of carbon dioxide ice that form on the surface of Mars each winter, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas, according to NASA.
This process, called “sublimation,” causes the ice to crack and brings dust and soil to the surface of the ice, according to the agency.
“When winter turns to spring and the remaining ice sublimates, according to the theory, the spiderlike scars from those small eruptions are what’s left behind,” researchers wrote in the study.
To recreate the formation process in DUSTIE, researchers said they analyzed simulated Mars soil that was contained and submerged into a liquid nitrogen bath.
Matching the reduced air pressure to match that of Mars’ southern hemisphere, researchers said they watched as carbon dioxide gas then flowed into the chamber and condensed into ice over a period of three to five hours.
Researchers then placed a heater inside the chamber below the simulated soil to warm it up and crack the ice.
Mc Keown said she was “ecstatic” when the theories were proven by seeing a carbon dioxide gas plume erupt from within the Mars soil simulation.
Lab experiments and orbiter images are the closest look NASA has at these unique Martian spiders, with the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers exploring far from the region where they occur.
So far, a spacecraft has yet to land on the Red Planet’s southern hemisphere.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem on September 2, 2024. (OHAD ZWIGENBERG/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
(TEL AVIV, Israel) — Officials in Israel’s defense establishment are now strenuously contradicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel maintain control of the narrow strip of land along the Gaza-Egypt border known as the Philadelphi Corridor, and warning that Netanyahu’s reluctance to sign a cease-fire deal with Hamas is pushing Israel into a potentially disastrous war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to Israeli military and senior defense officials who spoke with ABC News.
A war with Hezbollah in Lebanon “is easy to start, but very hard to end,” one such official said, on condition of anonymity. “We are losing the war, we are losing deterrence, we are losing the hostages.”
ABC News, along with other journalists and accompanied by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) personnel, was given access to the Philadelphi Corridor Friday — a narrow strip of territory roughly a half-mile wide that runs along the entirety of the southern Gaza border with Egypt. What were once blocks of apartments there are now piles of rubble amid a wasteland of dunes. Military officials told ABC News their work in the corridor was mostly done.
IDF and other Israeli military officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, have called a cease-fire and hostage release deal with Hamas the key to reaching a solution to Israel’s current regional strife. Israel and Hezbollah, which has been launching frequent rocket attacks against northern Israel from Lebanon, have each agreed to the broad parameters of a deal to decrease hostilities, but Hezbollah has said its participation is contingent on Israel reaching a cease-fire deal with Hamas in Gaza — which Hamas says must include all Israeli forces leaving Gaza.
However, many Israeli officials, including several who spoke with ABC News in recent days, believe that Netanyahu is purposely trying to torpedo negotiations to free the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas by insisting that the Philadelphi Corridor remain under Israel’s control, though they did not speak to possible reasons for Netanyahu’s insistence.
“If Philadelphi was so important, why did we wait eight months [into the war] to take it?” one senior Israeli official told ABC News.
Those officials now say that Israel is “stuck” in Gaza, able to kill Hamas militants and yet unable to advance one of the Israel-Hamas war’s primary aims, which Israeli Defense Minister Gallant recently told a small group of reporters was the “moral and ethical commitment” to bring Israel’s remaining hostages home. One official said that given the current circumstances, the best Israel can hope for is the repatriation of perhaps 20-30 hostages out of the 100 or so believed to remain in Gaza.
U.S. Envoy Amos Hochstein has been shuttling between Beirut and Jerusalem attempting to broker a cease-fire deal with Hezbollah that would see the latter retreat about 10 kilometers north of their current position in Lebanon, replaced by Lebanese Army forces and personnel from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), in exchange for small Israeli concessions along the Israeli-Lebanese border. This is the same deal Israeli officials have said has been on the table since January.
Adding urgency to the current situation are general concerns about whether Israel possesses sufficient munitions and missile and rocket/missile interceptors to defend itself in any confrontation with Hezbollah. One senior Israeli official told ABC News that Israel’s hawks, clamoring for war with Hezbollah, are unaware of how difficult it is for Israel to procure Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) kits, necessary to convert so-called “dumb” bombs into precision guided weapons that use GPS coordinates to strike a target.
Israeli officials are also concerned that Hezbollah’s estimated arsenal of over 100,000 rockets and missiles could cause widespread damage across Israel. Those officials also warn of the potential for destruction on the Lebanese side. For example, during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, Israel’s air force crippled Lebanon’s electrical grid and flattened large swaths of south Beirut.
Israel is also contending with how to respond to a recent attack from Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, after Israel says it intercepted and destroyed a Houthi surface-to-surface missile fired at Israel on Sunday.
The Houthi movement claimed responsibility for the missile attack, claiming in a statement that it was aimed at an “important military target” in the Tel Aviv region. The Houthis claimed the missile flew some 1,267 miles in less than 12 minutes and that Israeli anti-missile defenses “failed to intercept” the weapon. The IDF initially confirmed to ABC News that its defenses failed to intercept the missile but changed its conclusions upon further investigation.
The Israeli officials who spoke with ABC News said that Israel is vowing retaliation, and is investigating how the Houthis managed to twice penetrate Israel’s air defenses in two months.
“The Houthis are here to stay,” said one official, adding that the assessment is that they will likely keep attacking, regardless of a Hamas ceasefire.
