There is some confusion over the announcement in Washington that the administration of President Donald Trump intends reversing the 2014 Obama ban on elephant trophies imported into the United States. This would mean that American hunters may again import elephant trophies from hunts in Zimbabwe and Zambia, presumably this means ivory as it is unlikely that anyone is going to import a whole elephant. However, President Trump has since tweeted that he will review the ban, but for the moment it stays.
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Elephants are still listed under the Endangered Species Act in the United States, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service said that the reversal of the ban was because both Zimbabwe and Zambia had claimed that funds generated by the hunting of elephants was going back into wildlife conservation.
The continent-wide survey of elephant populations last year showed that Africa’s savannah elephant populations had declined by a total of some 30 percent between 2007 and 2014, leaving a total population of just 350-thousand.* That is down from an estimated 10-million a hundred years ago.
Before he became involved in politics, Donald Trump and his son Eric went hunting in Zimbabwe in 2012, when among other big game they shot an elephant and a cheetah.*
Now some very different news. The oldest fossils ever found may push back the age of life on Earth to possibly 4.3 billion years.
The Earth is estimated to be 4.57 billion years old, so these latest finds mean that there may well have been life here almost (in geological terms) at the beginning.
The fossils are tiny, as small as 0.5mm in length, and they are of ocean-dwelling bacteria. Scientists from the University College, London, found the fossils in the Nuvvuagittug Supracrustal Belt on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay in Canada, which is also the site of some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on Earth.**
And a remarkable success story from Kenya and England. A Nairobi teenager, Joel Kioko, has graduated from the slums of the Kenyan capital to being awarded a full scholarship at the English National Ballet School. He was 11 when he went with a cousin to a ballet class in a township school, “Intending to make a nuisance of myself,” he says. However, he just loved watching the boys dance and decided right then that ballet was for him. Joel became Kenya’s rising ballet star, he studied in the United States and then won his scholarship in England.***
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And another story with a happy ending. A very lalented young refugee from Syria, 14-year-old Aboud Kaplo, who fled from Aleppo with his family into Lebanon, carrying with him a toy violin, has been given a 19th century violin by the University of Oxford in England. Aboud, who taught himself to play, was ‘spotted’ by an English filmmaker who recognised his latent talent and approached the university to help the young would-be violinist.*** I wonder when next we’ll hear about Aboud?
*Save the Elephants News Service. **The Digging Stick, journal of the South African Archaeological Society. ***The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign Media.
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