A new species of jellyfish found off Israel’s coast the summer poses no threat to bathers but should serve warning to the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea about the dangers posed by global warming and damage to the environment. Named Marivagia stellata and marked by a translucent hue of blue, patterned with red stars, dots, and streaks, two specimens were caught on the southern edge of Haifa Bay and off the coast of Beit Yannai beach this summer. Measuring 15 centimeters (six inches) in diameter, the fish does not sting humans.

Swimmers view them as a nuisance because of their toxic and painful sting, but scientists have much bigger problems with jellyfish.  Hardy survivors, jellyfish thrive in places where overfishing, chemical pollution and rising sea temperatures have killed off other species. Indeed, they serve as a barometer of ocean health.

“It’s bad news,” says Bella Galil, a senior scientist at Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography in Haifa: “We don’t know how this particular species will develop, but the phenomenon causes the displacement, and replacement of native local communities with invasive species, and can destabilize the food chain.”

Surrounded by countries with more than 400 million people, the Mediterranean is one of the most heavily used bodies of water in the world – a fishing grounds, a transportation corridor, and the receptacle for sewage and industrial waste. About a third of the world’s total merchant shipping travels on Mediterranean waters and many species have nearly disappeared because of pollution, including the Mediterranean monk seal.

Marivagia stellata is just the latest in a series of invasive jellyfish species that has been discovered in the eastern Mediterranean over the years. Galil said the new species had probably originated in the Red Sea or Pacific Ocean and had arrived after traveling through Egypt’s Suez Canal, which connects the Red Sea with the Mediterranean.

“The Mediterranean is a very well-studied sea,” said Galil, who was among the team of scientist to identify the new species. “Because the jellyfish was found so close to shore, it is very unlikely that this jellyfish would escape notice in a sea studied so extensively.”

In fact, Marivagia stellata probably found its way in to the Mediterranean at least a few years ago. Galil said a specimen was discovered off the Israeli coast in 2006, but was lost before it could be positively identified.  Another specimen was probably caught off the coast of Lebanon in October, according to local media reports, which Galil termed a “bad omen.”

“It means that it just arrived and already has established in a fairly wide population and that it has the potential to increase and go further,” she said.

The Mediterranean has been invaded by successive waves of outside species, a process that began after the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean, according to Professor Menachem Goren, a marine biologist at Tel Aviv University. Among the more infamous interlopers, is the jellyfish Rhopilema nomadica, which is called “hutit” in Hebrew and began swarming southeast Mediterranean in the 1980s, inflicting painful injuries on unwary swimmers.

“Recently this phenomenon has accelerated and the number of invasive species has increased sharply,” said Goren, who attributed the increase to rising water temperature resulting from global climate change.

Scientists say it is too soon to tell what impact the new species will have. But jellyfish are blamed for clogging water intake pipes at desalination plants and coastal power plants. Marivagia stellata  and the increased jellyfish population could disturb the underwater food chain, scientists say. Jellyfish consume the plankton that other fish eat and prey on fish larvae.

Goren was careful not to speculate on the threat posed by Marivagia stellata, but noted that, “another jellyfish almost completely destroyed local fisheries in the Black Sea ten years ago.”

Reprinted courtesy of the Middle East News Source, The Media Line

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Israel’s northern neighbor is scrambling to set up a legal basis to challenge the Jewish state’s discovery of a gigantic natural-gas reservoir in the Eastern Mediterranean. Lebanese leaders are scrambling to pass legislation to govern offshore gas and oil exploration, following the discoveries of two gigantic natural gas reserves off the coasts of Israel and Lebanon, two countries in a state of war for decades.

The Lebanese parliament is set to discuss two draft laws that could manage offshore gas and oil exploration on Monday. The two versions of the bill differ over who will control potential revenues from offshore gas and oil discoveries: the President, through the Ministry of Energy and Water, or an independent body. In January 2009, an Israeli oil company discovered the first large natural gas reservoir, Tamar, some 55 miles off the coast of the northern city of Haifa.

Earlier this year, another offshore gas field, Leviathan, was discovered to contain 16 trillion cubic feet of gas, double that of the Tamar prospect. Once exploited, the fields could more than provide for Israel’s domestic demand and turn the country into one of the world’s top 10 exporters of natural gas. The Lebanese were quick to notice that their enemy’s new discoveries extend into Lebanon’s maritime territory, and that Israel had licensed the oil companies to explore (and eventually drill) in Lebanese territory.

Indeed, a US Geological Survey study earlier this year claimed that there are 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas off the coasts of Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Gaza Strip. Headlines like “Israel preparing to steal gas fields in Lebanon’s waters” and “Zionist Entity Robs Arab Resources” appeared across the Arab world within days.

Lebanese politicians jumped in to make a plethora of provocative statements, fanned by Hezbollah, the armed Shi’ite political movement, which pledged to defend Lebanon’s natural resources. Israel responded in kind, with the country’s Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau stating that the army “will not hesitate to use force” to defend the gas fields. The Israeli navy meanwhile extended a line of buoys two miles into the sea off the Israeli-Lebanese border.

“This is a very large discovery which extends into Lebanese waters,” said Dr. Manouchehr Takin, a senior petroleum upstream analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies. “They could do it jointly through what is called unitization, and have outside oil companies evaluate the total resource and estimate how many cubic feet are on the Israeli side and how many cubic feet are on the Lebanese side. Then the reservoir could be developed jointly with the profits shared according to each side’s relative portion, but they’d have to agree and be in a good, cooperative mood.”

Asked what would happen if Israel and Lebanon do not enter a good, cooperative mood in the near future, Dr. Takin said that “one side can drill for itself, the other side can drill for itself and have a race… In the end this will be damaging because if you produce too rapidly you end up not producing as much as you would otherwise.”

Beyond the militaristic oratory and bravado on both sides, there are significant domestic political challenges to Lebanon moving forward with offshore oil and gas exploration, as the country has no law to regulate offshore resources, effectively killing any chance that international oil companies would risk drilling.

“They don’t have a legal system for oil and gas,” Dr. Takin said. “Who does it belongs to? Should it be exploited by government or the private sector? If private, how should it be taxed or regulated?”

Saad Oueini, general manager of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists, said Lebanon’s business community would be unable to access the potential impact of Lebanese gas exploration until the political debate settles down: “It’s only a project now and we don’t know the feasibility of it,” he told The Media Line. “We can’t analyze its business impact yet because we don’t know if it will work or where it will go.”

Dr. Louis Hobeika, an economics professor at Lebanon’s Notre Dame University, said Lebanese politicians are getting way ahead of themselves: “In my view, the problem is we are not sure if we even have oil or gas, so what are we fighting about?” he told The Media Line. “Why do you need a law to organize something you don’t even know you have. Logically you send an exploration team to see what we have, where and how much.”

“They are spending their time fighting over nothing,” Dr. Hobeika said. “It’s only an issue because it hides the other more serious problems facing the country – government inefficiency, incompetence and corruption and the lack of adequate services in transportation, water, education, health.”

“In my view it has nothing to do with Israel,” he continued. “If Israel discovered something, what’s the problem? This is an economic issue that can be settled easily, as, if there is oil or gas between us and Israel, then the United Nations will have to intervene to divide the proceeds because we are in a state of war.”

Tala Al-Khatib, an education and outreach officer for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon, argued that given the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Lebanese should be more focused on the environmental implications of offshore drilling.

“The Lebanese coast is very important for fish spawning and sea turtle nesting, including the green sea turtle, which is an endangered species,” she told The Media Line. “The Mediterranean sea is already contaminated and is subject to threats including climate change, dynamite fishing, etc.”

“I personally believe that any potential pursuit of that kind could lead to a catastrophe similar to that caused by British Petroleum’s Deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” Al-Khatib continued: “Thousands of tons of oil leaked into the sea as a result of the 2006 Israeli air raid on the Jieh power plant in the South of Lebanon. This spill had a huge negative impact on the Mediterranean marine environment.”

“Drilling oil and gas off the Lebanese coasts could be dangerous,” she continued. “Having suffered huge environmental and economic losses, Lebanon cannot afford one more catastrophe… So why venture in risky endeavors?”

Read more on the natural gas saga:

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By all objective standards, this week Iran is facing some version of a moment of truth. Responding to the impending imposition of beefed-up United Nations economic sanctions, French oil company Total announced publicly that it was suspending oil shipments to Iran and the Spanish oil giant Repsol withdrew from a contract to develop part of a large Iranian oil field. Even Iran’s neighbor, the United Arab Emirates, announced a series of moves to comply with the strengthened sanctions regime.

But analysts disagree over the import of the sanctions, and the degree to which the new approach will influence the Iranian government.

“These new sanctions will target Iran’s financial sector, Iran’s ability to trade, Iran’s ability to communicate with the external world and travel, which begins to target the energy sector, and squeeze a number of companies connected to the revolutionary guard,” Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of Under a Mushroom Cloud – Europe, Iran and the Bomb, told The Media Line. “All of these things combined will have a significant effect.”

“Obviously, it could have been much tougher, but there are some aspects of the resolution which if implemented honestly, conscientiously and resolutely can do a great deal of damage at a time when the Iranian economy is particularly fragile due to the vast incompetence of the current government. And the internal political situation makes the government more vulnerable,” he continued. “If you look at sanctions as a way to slow down and damage the efforts of the regime then these efforts are valuable.”

“Those who think that sanctions will solve the problem are wrong: sanctions are not going to convince President Ahmadinejad or the Supreme Leader Khamenei to reconsider their approach to nuclear power, nor are sanctions going to bring down the regime,” Dr Ottolenghi said.

More on oil, green news and not-so green, from the Middle East:
Saudi Arabia to Replace Oil With Solar Power
Jordan Activists Worry About Oil Spill in Red Sea
Red Sea Oil Spill Cover Up Worse Than Expected
(This story is reproduced from the Middle East News Source – The Media Line)

Above image via azrainman

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Some drugs like pot, gat and hash are natural. But antidepressant drug abuse in Mecca, Saudi Arabia is causing social problems.

Mecca province, home to the holiest site in Islam, has the highest rate of drug-related crime in Saudi Arabia, a university study has found. The national study, carried out by Dr. Ashraf Shilbi of the National Center for Youth Research at King Saud University in the capital Riyadh, calculated that the number of drug-related legal cases in Mecca province has steadily risen by around 1,000 each year. In 2009 it peaked at 9,000 cases.

Most countries in the world are facing issues of teenage drug addiction and other forms of substance abuse.

“Drugs is certainly a problem in Saudi Arabia and every day you hear about the government killing someone for smuggling drugs,” Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a former teacher, told The Media Line. “I would think that the problem is more pronounced in Mecca because it’s very crowded and very easy to get a visa to come to Saudi Arabia for Hajj or Umrah, so many people can come as drug dealers under the guise of a pilgrim.”

The study, first reported by the Al-Madinah daily, found the Saudi capital Riyadh to be second in the number of drug-related cases, followed by the provinces of Jazan, the Eastern Province, Asir, Madinah, Tabuk, Al-Qassim and Al-Jouf.

While drug abuse made up the majority of cases, drug trafficking was also found to be on the rise. Despite a Saudi stigma that drug smuggling is led by foreigners, the study found the vast majority of drug smuggling cases to be Saudi citizens, with foreigners making up only 22 percent of drug trafficking cases.

The study also found that over the last decade Saudi hospitals in the country’s capital and commercial center have recorded a tripling of the number of drug addicts receiving treatment. The number of drug addicts seeking treatment in the Saudi capital Riyadh, for example, were found to have tripled, from 13,520 in 200 to 40,515 in 2009. The number of addicts treated in Jeddah more than tripled, from 10,876 in 2000 to 35,857 in 2009.

Ahmed Al-Omran (links to his blog Saudi Jeans), an influential Saudi critic and blogger, said it was unclear why Riyadh and Jeddah had witnessed such a notable rise in drug use. “There are likely many factors – unemployment, more people travelling inside and outside of the country, etc,” he said. “But it’s hard for me to speculate and the study should have looked more into the reasons for the rise in drug use.”

Al-Omran downplayed the importance of the study. “Drugs are everywhere in the world, the Mecca region is big and is not just the holy city of Mecca,” he told The Media Line. “So it doesn’t seem very weird that there would be a high rate of drugs in Mecca province.”

“Whenever the government publishes the news that they have seized a large amount of drugs coming into the country it indicates that there is a problem of drugs in the country,” Al-Omran said. “But the government only manages to seize a small percentage of what’s in the market, so they also need to work on awareness and make sure families know the dangers of drug use.”

Shilbi’s research found the most popular illegal drug in Saudi Arabia to be the antidepressant Catptagon, followed by hashish, Qat (or gat), heroin, amphetamine, opium and cocaine.

Hashish, dried cannabis also known as ‘hash’, made up the largest proportion of the drugs confiscated by Saudi authorities. The volume of Hashish seized has steadily increased by 18 percent each year. Qat, a plant with an amphetamine-like stimulant, made up the majority of drug seizures in the southern province of Jazan, with more than 10,000 recorded seizures of the plant last year alone. Seizures of cocaine and opium were very rare and recorded only in the capital Riyadh and Saudi Arabia’s commercial center Jeddah.

The study found that drug dealers in Saudi tend to be students or workers, and those most vulnerable to drug abuse tend to be young men aged 20 to 30. Bachelors and the unemployed were also found to be demographic groups more at risk for drug abuse.

The Saudi Interior Ministry announced last week that drug enforcement officials had completed one of the largest drug busts in its history, arresting 195 individuals over four months on charges of drugs smuggling. Authorities also seized eight million tablets of Captagon, two tons of hashish, and more than 20 kilograms of pure heroin.

Drug trafficking is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, regardless of the quantity being trafficked. The knock-on effect is that if drug traffickers take the risk of doing business in the Saudi kingdom, to make it worthwhile they will usually traffic huge volumes of drugs with large profit margins.

More on Middle East drugs and conflict with the environment and human health:
Hashish Shortage Stokes Bitterness in Egypt
Yemen’s Environmental and Social Problems Blamed on Chewing Gat
Afghan Opium Growers Get the Burn-Out

This article is reprinted courtesy of The Middle East News Source, The Media Line.

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Time to turn Saudi youth onto bicycling: video of dangerous stunts on the rise in young Saudi males who purposefully “drift” cars.

An average of 17 Saudi Arabian residents die on the country’s roads each day, a report by the Kingdom’s General Directorate of Traffic has revealed. The news comes after the World Health Organization found Saudi Arabia to have the world’s highest number of deaths from road accidents, which now make up the country’s principal cause of death in adult males aged 16 to 36. First reported by the Saudi daily Arab News, the study found that 6,485 people had died and more than 36,000 were injured in over 485,000 traffic accidents during 2008 and 2009.

There was no official reaction to the unfortunate world record, and Saudi analysts pointed to larger underlying problems.

“The driving problems are with young people,” Ali Abdul-Rahman Al-Mazyad, a Saudi columnist in Riyadh told The Media Line. “There are very little outlets for young people to enjoy themselves and kids basically do what they want.”

“There is also not such great education in schools about driving and respecting the road,” he said. “Drug use is also a contributing factor. These are the central problems.”

The report found that almost a third of traffic accidents in the Saudi capital Riyadh were due to drivers jumping red lights, followed by 18 percent of accidents caused by illegal U-turns. The most common dangerous driving activities were speeding, sudden stops and speaking on the phone while driving.

Over the past two decades Saudi Arabia has recorded 4 million traffic accidents, leading to 86,000 deaths and 611,000 injuries, 7 percent of which resulted in permanent disabilities.

A recent study at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), a Riyadh-based scientific research group, warned that if the current rise in road accident rates is not curbed, Saudi Arabia will have over 4 million traffic accidents a year by 2030. Oh, and Saudi Arabia wants to be the next Ibiza!

Silvio Saadi, a Jeddah-based businessman and film producer, argued that both the government and an out-of-control youth culture were to blame.

“You won’t believe what you see,” he told The Media Line. “It’s just crazy.”

“Saudis often try to drift with normal cars and thousands of spectators on the sides of the street,” he said, referring to an informal motor sport in which drivers intentionally over-steer so as to lose traction and drift on the road. “Sometimes the car drifts into the spectators, slamming them into buildings along the sidewalk.”

Saadi said that while the government has made some initiatives, they have fallen short of an aggressive road safety campaign.

“Outside the city, the police often cannot stop them,” he said. “The police are actually scared because there can be thousands of them. A few years ago they built a Jeddah raceway to attract young people to do it on the track instead of on the streets, but people still like to do it the old fashioned Bedouin way.”

“We get approached every year by government departments to produce public service announcements about speeding but most of the time nothing comes of it,” Saadi added. “Who knows what happens, but there is a lot of corruption. They probably take budgets from the government to do public service announcements and then don’t do it.”

Video of crazy road stunt as Saudi youth skate on the road.

[youtube width=”560″ height=”400″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJupNDIKkEk[/youtube]

Saudi Arabia has long had a taste for expensive cars, and spottings of young Saudis cruising the streets of Jeddah and Riyadh in Maseratis, Ferraris, Porsches and Harley Davidson motorbikes are increasingly commonplace.

One of the Middle East’s largest car markets, automobile sales make up about three percent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product.

Following overstated fears that the global recession might seriously weaken the Arab world’s largest economy, Saudi car sales are now expected to boom. The kingdom’s car market, including both commercial automobiles and transport infrastructure, is currently worth about $9 billion. The market is expected to grow by 30 percent in 2010.

Over 675,000 cars are expected to be sold in 2010 to a population of just under 25 million.

(This story by Benjamin Joffe-Walt is reprinted with permission by The Media Line, the Mideast News Source.)

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