Daily Archives: September 22, 2019

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MIGRATION LITERATURE: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns, edited by Dohra Ahmad. (Penguin, $17.) This collection of writings about migration includes excerpts from work by Phillis Wheatley, Edwidge Danticat (who also contributes the foreword), Salman Rushdie, Marjane Satrapi, Zadie Smith and others. The book seeks to refine and enlarge our definition of migrant literature, our critic Parul Sehgal writes. These stories and poems push back against the fallacies that migration is always elective; that migrants are always keen to leave their home countries; that migration is one-way, and necessarily leads to a better fate.

THE INSTITUTE, by Stephen King. (Scribner, $30.) In Kings most frightening books like this one, about the abduction of psychically gifted children the evil is perpetrated not by supernatural creatures, but by ordinary people like you and me. Our reviewer, Laura Miller, says the novel is as consummately honed and enthralling as the very best of his work. How do you maintain your dignity and your humanity in an environment designed to strip you of both? That theme, such an urgent one in literature from the 20th century onward, falls well within Kings usual purview.

WE, THE SURVIVORS, by Tash Aw. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The protagonist of Aws latest novel, a Malaysian man of modest means, has committed murder and served jail time for it; as he unspools his story, it becomes a searching commentary on the desperate conditions of the largely invisible work force propelling the global economy. Aw is a precise stylist; with a few, lean images, he evokes a country on the cusp of change: a sofa still sheathed in plastic to protect it from everyday life, the rusting tin for Danish butter cookies now holding a mans life savings, writes our reviewer, Hannah Beech (The Timess Southeast Asia bureau chief in Bangkok). The laborers who built modern Malaysia, Aw reminds us, are destined for obscurity, each layer of cement and heavy load they carry crushing who they really are.

THE OUTLAW OCEAN: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier, by Ian Urbina. (Knopf, $30.) Urbinas riveting chronicle of crime and lawlessness on the high seas based on a series of deeply reported features for The New York Times ranges from Somalia to the Philippines to the Antarctic, profiling pirates, slavers, poachers and others. Urbina highlights how, in overlooking the seas, weve allowed that void to become a vacuum for corruption, violence and lawlessness, a stage for gruesome deaths and even more gruesome lives, Blair Braverman writes in her review. And then he brings us into intimate contact with those lives, forcing witness.

EVERYTHING INSIDE: Stories, by Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $25.95.) The unreliability of the human heart connects many of the stories in this beautiful book, throughout which Danticats birthplace, Haiti, emerges in almost mythic fashion as a land that exists both in the past and the present even as it remains largely invisible. Apart from the land and people of Haiti, Aminatta Forna writes in her review, the books defining qualities are Danticats precise yet emotionally charged prose and the way she has curated this slim volume, bringing its elements together to create a satisfying whole.

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11 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times

This post was first published by theCenter for Climate and Life,a research initiative based at Columbia UniversitysLamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The JOIDES Resolution at the pier in Punta Arenas, Chile. (Photo: Thomas Ronge & IODP)

During the first half of 2019, two differentInternational Ocean Discovery Program(IODP) expeditions took international teams of scientists to the stormy Southern Ocean under the leadership ofLamont-Doherty Earth Observatoryscientists.

Maureen RaymoandGisela Wincklereach spent two months doing stints as co-chief scientist aboard the research vesselJoides Resolution. Their expeditions involved gathering information that will enable the geoscience community to learn more about Earths climate history.

Raymo, a paleoceanographer and director of theLamont Core Repository, was onIODP Expedition 382from March to May in areas of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.As co-chief scientists, Raymo and Michael Weber, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bonn, co-led a team of 30 scientists from around the world who are investigating how Antarcticas ice sheets responded to past global warming.

From May to July, Winckler, a climate scientist andCenter for Climate and Life Fellow, served as co-chief scientist forIODP Expedition 383in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean. She and co-chief scientist Frank Lamy, a geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, led a different group of 30 international scientists on an expedition to drill sediment cores along the Chilean Margin and in the Central South Pacific to study how the dynamics of the Southern Ocean affect the global climate system.

Sediment cores are records of Earths history: They contain the fossils of tiny organisms, mineral dust blown from the continents, and rocky material scraped by glaciers off the land and carried out to sea by icebergs. Specialized research vessels like theJoides Resolutionenable the collection of these sediments in the form of long cores. By analyzing the composition and geochemical fingerprints of the material in each core, scientists can figure out past variations in temperature, wind patterns, current speeds, and where any icebergs have come from and when.

Both expeditions will use the information contained within their newly recovered cores to examine how the atmosphere, oceans, and ice sheets responded to past global warming. These research projects are still in the early stages and will unfold over many years. What the scientists uncover will help the geoscience community make more accurate predictions about Earths future and enable us to better understand and adapt to climate change.

Iceberg Alley

Raymos expedition drilled sediment cores at five sites in an area in the Scotia Sea known as Iceberg Alley. Its east of the Antarctic Peninsula and many icebergs that break off the continent pass through the area.

The drilling was surprisingly successful, said Raymo, There was a very real possibility that there would be a lot of time lost getting out of the way of icebergs and bad weather and high seas. And while we did lose some time to those influences, most of the time we were drilling.

New sediment cores bring smiles to the core laboratory on the Joides Resolution. Maureen Raymo, co-chief scientist, is second from left. (Photo: Marlo Garnsworthy & IODP)

Eighteen sediment cores totaling almost three kilometers in length were recovered. The oldest cores date to the middle Miocene epoch, between 12 and 16 million years ago. Raymo said she was surprised that the drilling produced cores with continuous sedimentation for millions of years. Typically records near Antarctica have a lot of gaps in them, but ours are just beautiful continuous records of climate change, she said, giving credit to her co-chief, Mike Weber for identifying the drilling sites.

Raymo said the debris in the cores varies with age. Thats telling you that the dynamics of the Antarctic ice is changing dramatically through time, she said. Raymo and her expedition colleagues dont yet know what the changes indicate; they will discover that by investigating the sediment. But the changes show that the Antarctic ice sheet has not been as stable over millions of years as previously thought.

Now that the sediment core material is at Lamont, Raymo and her colleagues have begun quantitative analyses of the iceberg material in the cores. Raymo is focused on trying to understand the Antarctic ice sheets history for the time period between one and two million years ago, and establishing what conditions might cause the ice sheet to melt now.

A newly split sediment core collected during Raymos expedition. (Photo: Lee Stevens & IODP)

We have no idea how vulnerable the Antarctic ice sheet is to a modest amount of global warming, said Raymo. So were trying to figure out how the ice responded to warming in the past.

Knowing how fast the ice melted in the past is critical to understanding how Antarctica might respond to increased warming. And that will help scientists predict future sea level rise.

This wasnt Raymos first time serving as a co-chief scientist but she still feels its a privilege. As chief scientist, you really get to be a part of every sector of the science, she said. You get to solve problems with everybody, and you get to interface with the captain and the drillers.

Raymo says the hardest part of the expedition was working the midnight to noon graveyard shift for two months. But she also loved being at sea for that long. You can walk off the ship feeling like you have made lifelong friends with people that you didnt know when you walked on the ship.

The diverse team of expedition scientists, half women and half men, came from all over the world. Raymo says she found the environment less sexist and stressful with a crew that is comprised equally of women and men compared to life on a research vessel 30 years ago, when most participants where men.

The Pacific Sector of the Southern Ocean

Wincklers expedition drilled sediment cores in the central South Pacific, halfway between Chile and New Zealand, in the middle of nowhere, she said, where no expedition had drilled before.(Read Wincklers blog posts about the expedition here.)

Their science plan was to drill at four sites in the Central South Pacific, and three more sites at the Chilean Margin. The scientists hoped to obtain cores spanning the past five million years, including the Pliocene period, three to four million years ago. During the Pliocene, carbon dioxide levels were similar to what they are today, the planet was warmer, and global sea level was a good bit higher.

At two sites, the ship was able to drill even deeper in time, to the Upper Miocene period, about eight million years ago.

Gisela Winckler carrying a sediment core during IODP Expedition 383. (Photo: Tim Fulton & IODP)

Seeing that happen, core after core after core, drilling deeper and deeper into the sediments, hundreds of meters was fantastic, said Winckler. These beautiful, continuous sequences are ideal for interpreting the climate information in the sediments because it allows you to know where you are in terms of time.

The scientists recovered almost three kilometers of sediment core and some contained surprises. Drop stones, or large pebbles transported by icebergs, provide evidence that icebergs of the past had traveled to the ships location 1,000 miles from Antarctica, where no icebergs exist today. The finding could advance the teams research on how the Southern Ocean works as an interface between whats happening on Antarctica and the rest of the planet.

And at two sites, the team drilled into the basalt of the ocean crust much earlier than expected, illustrating how little is known about the ocean floor. Meanwhile, microfossil experts onboard found well-preserved microfossils of two brand new species of foraminifera, single-celled planktonic organisms.

Once the sediment cores were brought onto the ship and split open, the team saw color changes revealing distinct climates. Different types of microorganismsthe main ingredient of the sediments in the Southern Oceanthrive under different conditions, so you can see these time changes from warmer time periods into colder time periods or vice versa, just by looking at the color, said Winckler. Its sort of the poetry of these sediments and how they tell you their story.

Winckler is pleased with how well the expedition went, despite an unexpected change in schedule. In the middle of the expedition, a monster storm forced the ship to leave the region and travel about 1,500 miles north, where they ended up spending two weeks. Due to the storm, the expedition wasnt able to recover sediment from their southernmost site in the Antarctic part of the Southern Ocean, a crucial piece of their research project.

We never had a window of time with weather conditions long enough to work there successfully, said Winckler. That was the most difficult part of the expeditiongiving that up.

The bow of the Joides Resolution plunges into stormy seas during a storm the ship encountered during Expedition 383. (Photo: Christina Riesselman)

The cores from both expeditions will be archived at IODPs Gulf Coast Repository in College Station, Texas, with samples distributed all over the world to the expedition participants. At Lamont, Winckler, together withJenny MiddletonandJulia Gottschalk, two Lamont postdocs who also participated in the expedition, will analyze the sediment records to determine how Earth got into stages warmer than what we are experiencing today. They will examine the dust in the cores and how it connects to the carbon cycle, carbon storage, and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The international team of scientists will also analyze the different sizes of grains in the sediments which can reveal how fast the Arctic Circumpolar Current, the oceans fastest current, traveled in the past; the speed of the current influences the whole climate system.

Winckler says the Southern Ocean is one of the key regions that determine the planets climate, so scientists need to better understand how the entire system works and how fast it changes.

We need to feed our climate models better information and better constraints to improve how well we can predict the future, said Winckler.

We need that information about the natural variability of the past to understand what we are doing by impacting the natural climate system with our outrageous fossil fuel emissions.

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Two Months in the Southern Ocean, for Science - State of the Planet

Following MaltaToday's story of war on the high seas, where Tunisian poachers go so far as to ram Maltese fishing vessels and stealing lampuki from Maltese floats, the government said that it had taken the issue to the European Commission.

Clint Camilleri, writing in MaltaToday, said, "The European Commission has taken the view that a spatial dispute does indeed exist between Maltese and Tunisian fishers on lampuki fishing, and is therefore expected to raise the issue in the next meeting of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM)in Greece."

Camilleri, the Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries said that beyond the 25-mile radius from Maltese shores, in which the Armed Forces could intervene, the Maltese government had little power.

"This is not to say that we intend to sit on the fence, and indeed finding a long-term solution to this matter sits up there among our topmost priorities. Nevertheless it is clear that, objectively, this can only be achieved within the contexts of international agreements and forums," Camilleri wrote.

The GFCM is the regional fisheries management organisation, of which Malta and Tunisia are contracting partiesback in 2002, Camilleri said, an issue had been raised with Tunisia and the country's authorities had as a result put a temporary ban on poaching. Camilleri wrote that this is a reason to believe that diplomacy and negotiations with the Tunisian authorities could represent a way forward.

Gozitan crews have told MaltaToday of the terrors they face on the high seas. A Tunisian boat, brandishing a pictureof al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, and known colloquially as the 'Bin Laden' has rammed local fishing boats in the past, preventing them from accessing their ownkannizzati(fishing aggregating devices) whilst other vessels plunder Maltese spoils.

The crews have vividly described the horrors of Tunisian vessels ramming their own, often times brandishing machetes and petrol bombs and threatening Maltese fishermen with violence.

"I wish to assure all fishers that I am well aware of the hardships and threats that they have to face when they are out at sea. It is, therefore, with the utmost responsibility that I reiterate my own and governments commitment to their well-being, and I shall not rest in my endeavours to find the best possible avenues for helping and supporting them in their work.

"I am convinced that only possible solution to the current problem is clearly to negotiate an agreement with the Tunisian authorities within the GFCM, with the help of the European Commission. This is what I will be working towards in the coming weeks," Camilleri wrote.

He said that the government would be engaging with EU member states to find a "permanent solution" to the war currently staged in the Mediterranean over Malta's fishing capabilities.

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Government calls on European Commission to fend off Tunisian poachers - MaltaToday

Many volumes of books containing legal precedent from state and federal criminal and civil cases line the walls of the Pitkin County Courthouses district courtroom.

Pitkin County District Judge Chris Seldin regularly reminds defendants of their rights in his courtroom especially their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney.

It gets tricky, though, when defendants dont acknowledge his jurisdiction to oversee a case.

They may be part of a fringe group known as sovereign citizens though they often wont actually call themselves as such, preferring freemen or state citizens or any other number of names. Sovereign citizens subscribe to a belief that by not consenting to be governed, the government doesnt actually have any jurisdiction over their actions, especially when it comes to taxes and property.

As such, many sovereign citizens are wary of any perceived contract, often believing that a Social Security card or birth certificate are nefarious contracts literally enslaving you to the state. Further, because they fervently believe that renouncing such binds is the first step toward sovereignty, theyre often not keen on having others speak for them in a courtroom.

Isaac Brehm is one such example. He made headlines in March when he and another man were arrested for squatting for about three months in an Aspen house valued at nearly $3.6 million. Brehm has become somewhat notorious in the Pitkin County Courthouse, however, not because of the charges he faces which include six felonies ranging from burglary to vehicular theft but because of his insistence on representing himself.

He has the sovereign citizen idea in his head, and its not going to serve him, Deputy District Attorney Don Nottingham said outside the courtroom before Brehms preliminary hearing in July.

Brehm challenged the legitimacy of that hearing before it began, despite being the one who had requested it (a preliminary hearing is a right, not a requirement in the criminal justice process).

My proof of claims, Brehm started. I cant remember exactly the language, but basically asking for proof of claim from all parties.

For reference, he submitted a file hed presumably found on the internet.

To the extent that youre asking for information concerning the jurisdiction of the court, its your job to do the research on that. Ive already told you, the court believes it has jurisdiction to handle this case. I have no doubt about that, in fact, Seldin said, perusing the document Brehm had handed him.

It was clear that Seldin was familiar with the argument presented.

In terms of the legal basis for the courts jurisdiction, youll have to go do that research yourself, since you decided to represent yourself as the defendant in this case. With respect to your rights, Ive already advised you of your rights in this case, he continued.

I object, your Honor, Brehm retorted. Pretty much, youre saying I can go find this information, but a lot of this information Im asking for, I cannot just go find. I object. Id like to at least read this on the record.

At that, Seldins patience reached its capacity.

That request is going to be denied because that would be a waste of time and judicial resources. It will be admitted into the record as a filing by you, he stated flatly.

Brehm, equal parts frustrated and deflated, said for the record that this was pretty much blown off.

It happens in courtrooms all across the country, Nottingham said.

It is a not uncommon thing for defendants to look this stuff up on the internet and think that these are valid defenses, he said.

A strawman for everyone

Those defenses become very particular. Essentially, most sovereign citizens believe that at some point in American history, a corporation secretly acquired the United States before going bankrupt. Desperate to offset its losses, that corporation offered American citizens as collateral to financiers. It accomplished this by creating a strawman for every person; that is, the paper trail of a persons citizenship such as a birth certificate.

Even more specifically, many sovereign citizens believe that the government funds a secret bank account for each strawman to the tune of $630,000. Others still believe that the Social Security Administration was created to back that $630,000 amount.

This is your alter ego, all-capital letters-written-name strawman, explains the website Jabajabba.com. STRAWMAN is a legal term for a front man, or nominal party to a transaction, transmitting utility, existing in name only, which allows the owner to accomplish some purpose not otherwise permitted.

The strawman is a concept in sovereign citizen circles that describes a supposed shell legal identity for each citizen that is somehow separate from the actual person.

For instance, if a bill comes in the mail, but a persons name is misspelled by a letter, that bill is to the recipients strawman and, the argument goes, there is no legal requirement to pay it. And since paper agreements dont matter, the extremists in the movement will even employ a certain paper terrorism, as prosecutors call it, to clog legal systems, claim illegitimate tax refunds or even threaten law enforcement.

Former Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett experienced the latter firsthand. In 2015, he was on the receiving end of a targeted intimidation campaign by sovereign citizens. They dubbed themselves the Peoples Grand Jury of Colorado and sent phony arrest warrants often signed with a bloody fingerprint and filed liens against property owned by Colorado public officials.

They became known as the Colorado 8. The ringleader, Bruce Doucette, was sentenced to 38 years in prison in what the Colorado State Attorneys General Office saw as a message to others who would follow suit. Doucette opted to represent himself during his trial.

Since then, district attorneys and police officers all over the state have undergone training on how to recognize and handle a sovereign citizen, including locally. In January last year, the entire Aspen Police Department completed a four-hour online course on the matter through the industry resource center PoliceOne, Sgt. Mike Tracey confirmed.

Nottingham, too, attended a Colorado District Attorneys Council Conference put on by the attorney generals office that featured experts on sovereign citizens, and District Judge John Neiley even compiled a comprehensive document for fellow judges complete with suggestions, such as keeping their signed oath of office at the ready.

And the Colorado Supreme Court has made it very clear that things like calling out the fringe on the flag does not affect the court. There is Colorado constitutional authority and United States constitutional authority to have courts, Nottingham said. Personal jurisdiction is personal jurisdiction; there is no corporate entity, and there are many cases that talk about clerical issues, like if you write a name in all caps versus one capital letters and lowercase letters; theres no difference between those things.

While Nottingham and Seldin seemingly see sovereign citizens in the courtroom every year, Tracey said he could recall maybe one in-field incident in 17 years of police work: Redstone resident Stefan Schutter.

Schutter was part of a group of 12 adults and juveniles in 1999 colloquially known as Aspens Dirty Dozen for a string of armed robberies and burglaries that year. He served about six years of a 10-year sentence that he received after being found guilty in 2000 of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and theft. After being released in 2005, he earned himself another 10-year sentence after being found in the possession of an assault rifle, a revolver and a slew of drugs.

Schutter was not pitching the sovereign citizen argument then, but both Tracey and Sgt. Rick Magnuson recall him making that claim when he was arrested for DUI in 2017.

Hes not the only one from that 1999 group who subsequently used some of the sovereign citizen talking points in his defense strategy. Yuri Ognacevic, now 38, was arrested in July for two purse snatchings in Aspen and holding up a concession stand at Theatre Aspen. In his second court appearance in August, he told Seldin that he had every intention of representing himself.

Im well aware of my Sixth Amendment rights to represent myself, he told Seldin in the courtroom. I also have notes on a Supreme Court ruling from 1975, if you would like to hear those.

Though his actions may not be as outright as Brehm reading an actual script, its still a trademark move of a sovereign citizen.

Of the estimated 300,000 people in the United States who at some level subscribe to the ideals espoused in the sovereign citizen movement, only about one-third of them would act on those beliefs, according to a Forbes article by J.J. MacNab, a fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security program on extremism.

Be imaginative. Pull a line from the 1215 version of the Magna Carta, a definition from a 1913 legal dictionary, a quote from a founding father or two, and put it in the blender with some official-sounding Supreme Court case excerpts you found on like-minded websites, she wrote. Et voil, not only have you proven that you dont have to obey the law you dislike, heck, its your patriotic duty to disobey it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just plain un-American and is probably part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to ensure that Chihuahuas are slaves to the U.S. government.

Why is a homeland security and extremism expert writing about sovereign citizens? Because the Federal Bureau of Investigations considers them domestic terrorists.

That does not mean that Isaac Brehm is a terrorist. Seldin treated him more as simply misguided, reading from scripts he didnt comprehend, especially during Brehms closing statements at his preliminary hearing.

Id like to say, you know, pretty much you cant ignore the lack of jurisdiction, and once its challenged, it must be proven. And, uh, you probably know, tax appropriation, he started. Your implied consent is being challenged.

He then went on to list several U.S. codes and sections, eventually even getting into the legal definition of piracy.

Let me stop you there. Were not anywhere near the high seas; were in the Rocky Mountains in the center of the country, alright? Seldin interrupted. Heres my concern: Youre reading from a document that, its not clear to me you actually understand. I dont want to see you getting convicted of a crime that you may or may not have committed solely because you chose to represent yourself and you botched your own defense. Do you understand?

Still, Brehm has opted to persist in his own representation, and his trial is set for January next year.

He tried really hard to help the guy, Nottingham said of Seldin in reflection later.

Sovereign citizens often believe that official documents such as Social Security cards and birth certificates literally enslave people in a contract with the government to which theyre not privy.

Taking it to extremes

More often than not, sovereign citizens are more of Brehms ilk. To this day, Nottingham remembers his first courtroom encounter with the movement.

When I was an intern in Jefferson County dealing with barking dog cases and parking tickets, we had a guy that came in and started about the fringe on the flag and that it must be a court of admiralty and not a court of common law, and I was like, What is he talking about? he said.

The theories that many seeking the Truth return to when dealing with the criminal justice system can be disarming. And that can be dangerous if things do escalate, warns PoliceOne documents.

The threat to officer safety posed by sovereign citizens is well known. One must look no further than the tragic deaths of Sergeant Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans of the West Memphis Police Department in order to understand the risk of spontaneous violence from self-proclaimed sovereign citizens, one article reads.

Again, MacNab estimates that only one-third of an already relatively small group less than .001 percent of the population would act on extremist beliefs, but the beliefs are indeed extreme.

Remember Jabajabba.com? In the side panel of the webpage breaking down the strawman theory, there is a column with links to such literature as The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America and Human Biodiversity and the Hidden Origins of the Caucasian Race.

And while certainly not all proclaimed sovereign citizens would align with white nationalism, the movements history is rooted in it. A group of self-proclaimed Nazi sympathizers who called themselves the Comitatus Posse founded what became the first generation of the sovereign citizen movement, from 1970 to 1995. Perhaps because Comitatus Posse existed in the Pacific Northwest, the broader movement which typically consisted of white, high-school-educated men thrived most in the western part of the country.

Today, sovereign citizens claim almost all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. But some of the biggest court cases are still in western states: Cliven and Ammon Bundy, who in an armed standoff occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2014, both used language in media interviews familiar to sovereign citizens. And of course, Doucette and his Colorado 8 still influence current-day training priorities in the state.

Perhaps the geography is coincidental; perhaps its because of the history of the Comitatus Posse. Or maybe its cultural.

Colorado is a sort of libertarian-ish state, Nottingham said. Alaska, Montana, Colorado sort of these Western states that do believe that the authority of the government is derived by the consent of the governed. Thats a foundational aspect of government, of what it is. Thats not individual consent; that is group consent of the government. You dont get to opt out whenever you want. People have tried that before, and they get charged with treason.

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Against the grain, against the law | News - Aspen Daily News

SAMSUN Demirren News Agency

With the water temperature level persisting above seasonal norms in the Black Sea, fishermen did not reach their desired levels of hunting, triggering high prices for fish.

Experts had said in the beginning of September, when fishing season in Turkey kicked off towards the end of the month, as more boats hunted, the prices would naturally decrease.

But things did not go as planned, with the water temperature in the Black Sea persisting above the seasonal norms.

The horse mackerel (istavrit in Turkish) was sold at the Samsun Metropolitan Municipality Fish Market at 5-10 Turkish Liras ($0.9-$1.75) per kilogram in the first days of September, but now the price has gone up to 18-20 liras ($3.1-$3.5).

The whiting (mezgit in Turkish), on the other hand, is currently sold at a price of 30-35 liras per kilogram, whereas red bullet (barbun in Turkish) at 40 liras, sea bass at 35 liras and salmon at 30 liras.

A local fisherman said that they had initially thought that the seas would be rich in fish, but things did not turn out as they hoped.

Acorn [palamut in Turkish] has been very low in quantities since the beginning of the season and we do not think they will increase in the rest of the season. Apart from that, we are selling whiting, red bullet, horse mackerel and small bluefish [inekop in Turkish]; but since the fish being low in quantities, the prices are a bit high, said Mustafa ubuk.

I do not think that the prices will fall very much in the rest of the season, but if the weather gets a bit cooler, there will be more fish, he said.

Experts have also warned against unconscious urbanization, pollution and overfishing, saying that these are other reasons for the decline in the number of fishes in Turkish seas.

Cokun Erz, an academic at the marine sciences faculty at Karadeniz Technical University (KT), said that the seas being filled up for urban use is a blow to the future of fish populations.

The main reason of this [the decrease in fish populations] is [humans] taking away their physical conditions and the over-pollution of the coasts chemically. And apart from that, if we continue to do overhunting, the fish, which are low in numbers anyway, will go extinct, he said.

Prof. Dr. Ertu Dzgne, of the Department of Fisheries Technology Engineering at KT, said that there was an urgent need for a fish hunting management plan.

The conditions have gradually worsened for the fish. There is a contrary belief which is that if we hunt more, we will gain more. But no, if you hunt more, fish prices will fall. And you will end up hunting for small-sized fish, which would be normally the parents of next years yield. So that would be shooting oneself in the foot, said Dzgne.

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Above-average water temperature in Black Sea leads to poor catch - Hurriyet Daily News

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, in its mission to defend, conserve and protect the seas and marine wildlife, announced that it is launching Operation Treasured Islands late this fall.

The campaign focuses on Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing in the Tropical Eastern Pacific, a two million square kilometer area extending along the Pacific coast of the Americas from Mexico to Peru. At its heart is the Galapagos Islands an archipelago so rich in life, it played a key role in Charles Darwins Theory of Natural Selection.

Sea Shepherd will be patrolling these waters in cooperation with the governments of Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Costa Rica, working to enforce existing treaties and laws. The campaign also involves a partnership with Skytruth. The environmental watchdog monitor activities from space and from the surface and will be highly instrumental in observing and catching IUU fishing activities.

As one of the richest areas of marine biodiversity, the Tropical Eastern Pacific is home to 88 species of shark, oceanic mantas, turtles, tuna, dolphins, and blue whales. It is, unfortunately, also an area presently under destructive assault by well-organized industrialized poachers.

Sea Shepherd is preparing to sail into the midst of a huge fleet of factory vessels operating in the rich biodiversity of the waters of the Eastern Tropical Pacific, noted Captain Paul Watson, Founder and Executive Director of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Our mission is to search out and investigate high seas crimes ranging from illegal fishing, shark finning and human trafficking.

Sea Shepherds M/V BRIGITTE BARDOT will carry out on-going high-seas patrols covering 2,500 nautical miles from Baja, California to the coast of Peru, patrolling a nutrient laden migration corridor, so rich in marine life, it contains one fifth of the worlds fish catch, said Captain Locky MacLean, Director of Campaigns at Sea Shepherd. Sea Shepherds permanent presence in the region, will act as a sentinel beyond national boundaries, protecting pelagic species from massive fishing fleets hailing as far away as the Asian continent.

For more than four decades, Sea Shepherd has become the worlds most effective international maritime, anti-poaching organization. Through direct action and lawful means, Sea Shepherd has stopped high seas criminals, assisted national marine park rangers, removed illegal nets, and longlines, and prevented the diminishment of numerous species.

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Sea Shepherd Conservation Includes Costa Rica in Long-Term Oceans Campaign - The Costa Rica Star