Spanish Catalonia presses independence bid with human chain

1 of 3. A woman holds an ''Estelada'' (Catalonia separatist flag) flag as she attends a ceremony to mark the ''Diada de Catalunya'' (Catalunya's National day) in central Barcelona September 11, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Gustau Nacarino

By Julien Toyer

BARCELONA, Spain | Wed Sep 11, 2013 12:33pm EDT

BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Catalans held hands in a 400-km (250-mile) human chain across their region on Wednesday to press the Spanish government to let them vote on breaking away and forming their own country.

Demonstrators in yellow T-shirts and draped in blue, red and yellow separatist banners raised their joined hands through cities and along rural roads, jumping and shouting in celebration when the chain was completed.

"We want a referendum to see whether there's majority support for independence. The problem is Spain won't listen. Our only hope ... is that Europe and the rest of the world put pressure on the Spanish government," said Ester Sarramona, a 39-year-old civil servant.

Sarramona and her husband and two children joined the chain in the heart of Barcelona, Catalonia's capital. Like many other Catalans, they said their region was treated unfairly over taxes and cultural issues such as the Catalan language.

A deep recession and cuts in public spending in Catalonia, a wealthy industrial region in the northeast that accounts for a fifth of Spain's economic output, have stirred discontent with the central government in Madrid.

Polls show backing for secession has risen steadily in Catalonia, with some registering support as high as 50 percent. An large majority of Catalans want the right to hold a vote on the issue, the polls show.

PYRENEES TO VALENCIA

The demonstration, on Catalan national day, comes as separatists try to revive their referendum drive. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and Catalan President Artur Mas have signaled they are open to talks to end a year-long standoff over greater tax powers for the region.

Organizers said they accomplished their goal of forming an unbroken line from the Pyrenees in the north to the border with Valencia in the south, and television footage showed huge segments of the completed chain.

The act was inspired by a similar 1989 demonstration that helped the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania win independence from the Soviet Union.

Growing separatism in the region of 7.5 million people has become a major headache for Rajoy, who is mired in a corruption scandal and trying to pull Spain out of recession while also pushing through unpopular spending cuts.

Catalan separatists are watching closely a planned September 2014 Scottish referendum on independence from the United Kingdom, hoping it will promote the idea of self-determination for regions within countries that belong to the European Union.

Although Catalans have nurtured a separate identity for centuries, an independence movement surged recently as Catalans became disillusioned with limitations on the autonomy they gained in the late 1970s after the Francisco Franco dictatorship, which had suppressed Catalan nationalism.

Traffic clogged highways as police cut some roads to allow the chain to form.

"If we don't get a referendum people will just get more frustrated," said Bernat Cabero, a 53-year-old sculptor who lives in France and traveled home to Catalonia to participate.

PUSHING THE PRIME MINISTER

Rajoy says a referendum would be unconstitutional and has pledged to block it in the courts.

Opponents of independence argue the region has never been an entirely separate state. The Medieval Principality of Catalonia came under the Crown of Aragon, though it was allowed to run its own affairs through an institution known as the Generalitat.

The human chain linked up on Wednesday at exactly 17:14, symbolizing the year 1714 when King Philip V abolished the Generalitat after the War of the Spanish Succession.

Catalan President Mas has threatened to call an early election and use it as a plebiscite on secession if Rajoy uses the courts to block a referendum. This is seen as a risky move as his political alliance has lost ground while a more leftist separatist party has won support in the past year.

Mas is in a delicate position because the Catalan budget hole is so big that the central government had to bail out the region last year.

"We are talking with the Spanish government but I have a lot of doubts over whether it will be fruitful," Mas told foreign journalists on Wednesday morning.

Rajoy also has limited room for maneuver as any offer to Catalonia of better fiscal treatment or more political autonomy could spur protests in other Spanish autonomous regions such as the Basque Country.

(Writing by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Andrew Roche)

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Indian Tigers Trapped in "Human Sea" Escape to Find Mates

The tiger Shere Khan was lord in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, but his modern-day descendants are king no more: The big cats have seen their central Indian forests dwindle and fracture.

The remaining tigers are only surviving by moving through critical—but unprotected—corridors of land that link distant populations, a new study says.

Using hair and fecal samples, Sandeep Sharma, of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and team studied genes from 273 individual tigers that live in four distinct locations within India's 17,375-square-mile (45,000-square-kilometer) Satpura-Maikal region.

Tigers once roamed across Asia from Turkey to the Russian Far East, but have vanished from over 93 percent of that range. (See tiger pictures.)

The 20th century was especially tough on the now-endangered beasts, when three subspecies became extinct, leaving six—all of which are at risk. (See a National Geographic magazine interactive of big cats in danger.)

At a glance the region's tigers seem to live in four populations, each occupying its own territory in what's called a designated tiger conservation landscape, or TCL. Those are Kanha-Phen, Pachmari-Satpura-Bori, Melghat, and Pench.

But the genetic study suggests otherwise: Corridors of woods and undeveloped land up to 125 miles (200 kilometers) long actually link Kanha and Pench into a single genetic unit, and Satpura-Melghat into a second.

That means the four populations of tigers are breeding as two much larger populations—and keeping their genetic diversity alive in the process.

Corridors also aid tiger survival on the ground, Sharma said, making the cats more likely to withstand many types of threats. (Related:"Tigers Making a Comeback in Parts of Asia.")

"If one of two connected populations drops, say because of poaching or some other factor, the other can expand and repopulate the area," he explained. But if these corridors aren't protected as wildlife habitat by the government or other entities, the land may be developed and leave the tigers in "islands."

If this happens, "eventually they are doomed."

Tiger Family Tree

Sharma and colleagues looked at the tiger population tree in the Satpura-Maikal region, which has seen dramatic declines in tiger habitat. (Read "A Cry for the Tiger" in National Geographic magazine.)

The team found two distinct periods in which tigers' genetic populations divided rapidly, and each was tied to known historical events.

"One was about 700 years ago, and that's [around] the time when Mughal invaders came into the region and they started clearing river valleys and intensified agriculture in those valleys," he said, noting that the major threat facing tigers at that time was habitat loss.

The second period was about 200 years ago, Sharma said, when the British Empire not only felled trees to fulfill its enormous need for timber, but also introduced a vast arsenal of firearms that dramatically increased the number of tigers killed by hunters.

"You can really see these two distinct patterns of genetic subdivision in this population," said Sharma, whose study appeared July 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Sharma and colleagues also used their data to look back in time some 2,000 years and compare the present situation with ancient patterns of tiger gene flow.

Only tigers in those populations still connected by these corridors are maintaining similar levels of gene flow [to what] we saw historically," he explained.

In areas "that have lost the corridors, the gene flow has significantly decreased."

Living With Tigers

By illuminating the past and present the study provides a roadmap for where future conservation efforts must be focused—keeping the fragile links open between different population groups, according to the authors.

Today, however, these tiger corridors have no legal protection. They are simply forest landscapes, used by local peoples and subject to development, including mining in one of India's prime coal regions.

Earlier this year the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests gave Coal India Limited permission for coal-mining development in the crucial Satpura-Pench wildlife corridor.

Officials stated publicly that the mine is an underground rather than open facility, and thus shouldn't interfere with the tigers' migratory corridor.

But Sharma is unconvinced, suggesting that mining brings with it settlements, roads, and infrastructure, which can be a major threat to the corridors just at the time when hard genetic data have shown that tigers are using them to travel and reproduce.

Conservationist Luke Dollar, a National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer who manages the society's Big Cats Initiative, said the tough decisions faced here are common where big cats prowl.

"India has half of all the remaining tigers on Earth, but it's also a perfect example of what we face in big-cat conservation, whether it be here or in Africa," he said. "The cats and people are colliding in a struggle for space and existence."

Dramatic Interventions

Where populations become very isolated, dramatic human interventions may be necessary to save inbred cats, Dollar added.

For instance, in 1995 Texas cougars were released to breed with and revitalize a Florida panther population so small and inbred that Dollar described them as "walking dead."

Protecting wildlife corridors is the best way to avoid such drastic measures and offers a better chance of success as well.

"In conservation it's not individuals or individual populations that we worry about if we're going to play the long game," he said.

"We worry about the overall genetic integrity of the species, which is exactly where corridors are critical as the mechanism for genetic exchange that can maintain a robust population."

"Floating in a Human Sea"

Sharma stressed that tigers need to be managed not with a myopic approach, as isolated populations, but as one big population connected by corridors.

"India has the second largest human population in the world, and these tigers are floating in a human sea," he said.

"We can't create new tiger habitat, and there is no hope outside these areas. The only hope is these corridors. If you cut them down, and fragment these populations, eventually they will only exist in history books."

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EU says member states failing to crack down on human trafficking

European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom addresses a news conference on ''Tackling human trafficking'' at the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels April 15, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Francois Lenoir

BRUSSELS | Mon Apr 15, 2013 1:40pm EDT

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Thousands of people are falling victim to human traffickers every year in the European Union but most member states have failed to implement tougher new laws agreed by the bloc to address the problem, the European Commission said on Monday.

The new laws, agreed in 2011, impose higher penalties on offenders, make it easier to prosecute across borders within the bloc and give better protection to victims.

Only six countries in the 27-member bloc have implemented the new legislation so far, the Commission said.

Trafficking victims are typically women and they are predominantly forced into sexual slavery, but also hard labor and criminal activity. Some have their organs removed.

Information released by the EU executive on Monday showed the number of identified trafficking victims increased by 18 percent between 2008 and 2010 to about 10,000, although that number likely represents a fraction of all victims.

"What we know is probably only the tip of the iceberg," said Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU commissioner for home affairs.

"I am very disappointed to see that, despite these alarming trends, only a few countries have implemented the anti-trafficking legislation and I urge those who have not yet done so to respect their obligations."

Most of the victims identified were citizens of Romania and Bulgaria, the two poorest members of the bloc. Neither country has implemented the new laws.

EU governments which do not implement common rules can face legal action and fines.

An estimated nearly 21 million people worldwide are victims of human trafficking, according to 2012 statistics from the International Labor Organization.

(Reporting By Teddy Nykiel; Editing by Pravin Char)

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