Group cites trade in illegal timber
Global demand for cheap consumer wood products has turned China into the center of a thriving illegal timber trade that is wiping out some of the world’s most endangered forests, the environmental group Greenpeace charged Tuesday.
Recent restrictions on logging in China have resulted in Chinese companies turning to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, especially the tropical rain forests in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. As a result, Greenpeace says in a new report, China has become the world’s largest importer of tropical wood, much of it logged illegally.
“Illegal logging is rampant in many of the countries that supply China with wood and this destructive trade is fueling the global forest crisis,” said Sze Pang Cheung, deputy campaign director for Greenpeace China.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said on Tuesday that the government has consistently been opposed to illegal logging but that the problem is not China’s alone.
Islamabad, Pakistan
Surgeons remove fetuses from infant
Surgeons operated on a 2-month-old Pakistani girl Tuesday to remove two fetuses that had grown inside her while she was still in her mother’s womb, a doctor said.
The infant, who was identified only as Nazia, was in critical condition following the two-hour operation at The Children’s Hospital at Pakistan Institute of Medical Science in the capital, Islamabad, said Zaheer Abbasi, head of pediatric surgery at the hospital.
Abbasi, the chief doctor who led the operation, said the case was the first he was aware of in Pakistan of fetus-in-fetu, where a fetus has grown inside another in the womb.
“It is extremely rare to have two fetuses being discovered inside another,” Abbasi told the Associated Press, adding that he did not know what caused the medical abnormality. “Basically, it’s a case of triplets, but two of the siblings grew in the other.”
Abbasi said surgeons removed the two partially grown fetuses, totaling about two pounds, that had died at about 4 months.
Baikonur, Kazakhstan
Russians prepare Soyuz for launch
Engineers rolled a Russian spaceship out to the launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome Tuesday, taking the final steps to prepare for a crew’s upcoming mission to the International Space Station.
Workers moved the gray and white Soyuz-TMA8 on train rails from its assembly site only 48 hours before it will hurtle from the Central Asian steppe into space carrying Russian Pavel Vinogradov, American Geoffrey Williams and Brazil’s first astronaut, Marcos Cesar Pontes. The mission will include experiments designed to see how humans react to prolonged space travel.
The American space program has depended on Russian Soyuz and Progress craft to ferry its astronauts and supplies to the orbiting space station since the 2003 Columbia disaster grounded the U.S. shuttle fleet. Though the shuttle Discovery visited the station in July, troubles with foam insulation on its external fuel tank have cast doubt on when the shuttle will fly again.