Apes in the News

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AFP) - Greenpeace campaigners abseiled into Nestle's annual shareholders meeting on Thursday to urge the food giant to stop using palm oil harvested from rainforest destruction.

An AFP photographer saw the two activists break through the roof and abseil into the hall with mountaineering gear.

They hung a banner with the slogan "Nestle, Give the orangutans a break!" -- in a play on a Nestle marketing slogan -- and remained dangling about 20 metres (66 feet) above the shareholders' heads as the meeting continued.

15/04/2010
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Adianto P. Simamora ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 04/14/2010 8:43 AM  |  National

The forestry ministry dropped its controversial initiative to classify oil palm plantations as forests after strong protests from environmental activists on fears that it would speed up deforestation.

The statement was made by the ministry's head of research and development Tachrir Fathoni on the sidelines of a seminar on Indonesian forestry following the Copenhagen climate talks.

"We have dropped it. No more talk about it," he told reporters on Tuesday.

14/04/2010
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By JAMES BARRON

Scientists who have begun testing bushmeat - meat from African wild game, that is often carried through customs in luggage, or shipped by mail - say they have discovered viruses related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

Dr. William Karesh, a veterinarian in charge of Wildlife Conservation Society health programs, said the viruses showed up in spot checks of "hundreds of samples" that were only a fraction of the bushmeat that comes into New York. The viruses in question have been shown to infect humans, but Dr. Kristine Smith, another veterinarian from the society, said in a presentation at Rockefeller University on Wednesday that they were not known to cause disease.

14/04/2010
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BY Bill Hutchinson | DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER | Sunday, April 11th 2010, 11:09 PM

It's a fight club for orangutans.

A safari theme park in Thailand has become a macabre tourist attraction for its orangutan kick boxing matches - complete with simian "round card girls."

11/04/2010
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Artcile by the Mail Foreign Service

Dressed in garish shorts and boxing gloves, orangutans trade punches and spin-kick each other in a boxing ring.
Horrifying footage shows cheering tourists drawn to the barbaric sport at a theme park called Safari World on the outskirts of Bangkok in Thailand.
The same company was banned from doing exactly the same thing just six years ago.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1264865/Orangutans-kickbox-parade-bikinis-cheering-tourists.html

10/04/2010
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mongabay.com

     Sales of palm oil certified under the green criteria set by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) reached a record high in March, climbing nearly 8 percent over February 2010 to 136,000 metric tons, reports the RSPO in its monthly bulletin.

http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0409-rspo.html

09/04/2010
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