Hilary Rosner - Newsweek

A hundred or so orangutans have just returned from a day at "forest school," where they learn to find food, use tools and fear snakes. Assembled on a lawn, they act much like any group of kids at recess-congregating in small groups, clocking each other over the head, holding hands, turning somersaults and adroitly climbing a jungle gym. These apes are orphans, having lost their forest homes to palm-oil plantations and their mothers to poachers who sell the babies to an illegal pet trade. A few still bear the marks etched into their necks from the months or years they spent in chains. The staff at the Nyaru Menteng orangutan sanctuary, in Central Kalimantan on the Indonesian side of Borneo, is painstakingly raising the apes, acting as surrogates for orangutan mothers who rear their young for up to eight years. Once they're old enough and wise enough to survive on their own, the apes move to islands that serve as halfway houses until the animals can be placed back into the jungle.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/209956

01/08/2009
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248 endangered primates left in cages after mining company pulls out of rescue

by Martin Hickman

A world-renowned programme to return hundreds of orang-utans threatened with extinction to the wild has been thrown into disarray by the withdrawal of Britain's biggest mining company from Borneo.

Dozens of orang-utans that had been due to be released this month have been left locked in cages after BHP-Billiton warned it could no longer guarantee the safety of the animals on forests it had been surveying for coal.

With BHP's support over the past two years, orang-utans from a rehabilitation centre - made famous by the BBC TV series Orang-utan Diary - have been released onto BHP's land in Kalimantan. But last month the world's largest mining company told investors it was withdrawing from the area for "strategic reasons" which it declined to explain.

Published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by The Independent/UK

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/27-7

27/07/2009
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Leo Lewis In Tokyo

Elephants, Sumatran tigers and some of Asia's rarest orang-utans will be plunged into a "dire and immediate" fight for their lives this summer as plans are finalised for a massive logging operation in Indonesia aimed at keeping the world supplied with cheap photocopying paper.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6466405.ece

10/06/2009
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Dangerous climate change will be unavoidable if the UK, EU and USA succeed in increasing the use of carbon offsetting, Friends of the Earth is warning in a new report released today [Tuesday 2 June 2009] that exposes carbon offsetting as ineffective and damaging.

http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/offsetting_report_02062009.html

02/06/2009
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Date: 01-Jun-09
Country: INDONESIA
Author: Sunanda Creagh

NUSA DUA - Carbon credits derived from a fledgling forest conservation scheme for developing nations will struggle to compete with palm oil as an investment, industry advisers and conservationists said on Friday.

http://planetark.org/wen/53165

01/06/2009
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Date: 01-Jun-09
Country: INDONESIA
Author: Sunanda Creagh

NUSA DUA - Carbon credits derived from a fledgling forest conservation scheme for developing nations will struggle to compete with palm oil as an investment, industry advisers and conservationists said on Friday.

http://planetark.org/wen/53165

01/06/2009
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