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BEN # 118



                                                   
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No. 118                              November 14, 1995

aceska@freenet.victoria.bc.ca        Victoria, B.C.
-----------------------------------------------------------
 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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