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BEN # 118
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No. 118 November 14, 1995
aceska@freenet.victoria.bc.ca Victoria, B.C.
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Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2
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KEN SARO-WIWA AND EIGHT COLLEAGUES HANGED IN NIGERIA
From: Web pages at http://www.oneworld.org/
World outrage tinged with despair greeted the news on Friday
November 10, 1995 that Nigeria's best-known human rights ac-
tivist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues had been
hanged.
Saro-Wiwa, who was a successful writer and businessman, was
leader of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni peoples, which
had campaigned against the pollution and exploitation of their
land by multinational oil companies - especially the Shell Co.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize
and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Leaders at the Commonwealth summit in Auckland, angered at
General Abacha's disregard of their pleas for clemency, agreed
to suspend Nigeria immediately from the Commonwealth. The
country now has two years to embrace democracy or face permanent
exclusion.
You can find more on Web pages at http://www.oneworld.org/
Also on that site is a transcript of The Drilling Fields and
condemnation from writers around the world in an article from
PEN International, press releases from the Ogoni Community
Association in London (including a plea from Saro-Wiwa's son,
Ken Wiwa, calling for international action to stop the execution
of his father) and Greenpeace statements. We have also inter-
viewed Glen Ellis, Director of the Drilling Fields - the award-
winning TV documentary that helped bring the exploitation of the
Ogoni land and people by Shell and the military government to
the world's attention.
REPORT OF FOSSIL ARBUSCULAR MYCORRHIZAE FROM THE EARLY DEVONIAN
From: Bryce Kendrick <bkendric@sol.UVic.CA>
Taylor, T. N., W. Remy, H. Hass & H. Kerp. 1995. Fossil arbus-
cular mycorrhizae from the early Devonian. Mycologia 87:
560-573.
This paper reports the first unequivocal evidence of arbuscules
in a presumably mutualistic endomycorrhizal symbiosis. Although
vesicles closely resembling those of modern VAM (vesicular-
arbuscular mycorrhiza) fungi have previously been reported in
fossils in the Rhynie Chert, the photomicrographs illustrating
this paper are the first to show the truly diagnostic structure
of endomycorrhizal fungi, the arbuscule. Arbuscules are finely
branched, tree-like fungal structures that are produced inside
cells of the host root cortex, and it is these structures that
form the vital interface between fungus and plant. Now fossil
material of Aglaophyton from the Devonian has been found con-
taining both vesicles and arbuscules. On the strength of these,
a new genus, Glomites, has been described as the fossil
homologue of the modern genus Glomus. In the opinion of this
abstractor (BK) the VAM fungi must now surely be recognized as
among the most conservative of all eukaryotic organisms, since
their morphology has changed little if at all in 400 million
years.
WWW SITES OF INTEREST
List of WWW Sites of Interest to Botanists
http://meena.cc.uregina.ca//bio/botany.html
http://biomserv.univ-lyon1.fr/botany/botany.html (mirror)
List WWW Sites of Interest to Ecologists
http://biomserv.univ-lyon1.fr/Ecology-WWW.html
http://meena.cc.uregina.ca//bio/ecology.html (mirror)
The long file ("A Collection of Botany Related URLs") with all
the links will still be available in Helsinki:
http://www.helsinki.fi//botany.html
The menu page for the new system is at:
http://www.helsinki.fi//bot_menu.html
A large collection of forestry links is available at the WWW
Virtual library for Forestry at
http://www.metla.fi/info/vlib/Forestry.html
Indices Nominum Supragenericorum Plantarum Vascularium:
http://matrix.nal.usda.gov:8080/star/supragenericname.html
A New Palaeo-Ecosystem Atlas and literature review on the web:
http://www.soton.ac.uk//adams1.html
Cambridge University Press has established a WWW site:
http://www.cup.org
The Quaternary Research Association now has a WWW page at:
http://www2.tcd.ie//qra.html
Environment Canada's WWW server:
http://www.ns.doe.ca
The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is an
initiative of the NBS to foster the development of a distributed
electronic network of biological data and information maintained
by a variety of Federal and State government agencies, univer-
sities, museums, libraries, and private organizations. The NBII
is available on the Internet:
http://www.nbs.gov/nbii/
The TAXACOM List Archive is also indexed by date, author and
thread, and is conveniently browsable as a Word Wide Web Hyper-
mail archive:
http://muse.bio.cornell.edu/archive/taxacom.html
Missouri Botanical Garden has expanded web resources:
http://www.mobot.org
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