Page A6 • Friday, December 13, 2013
NATION & WORLD
Arctic gets a break, but warming ongoing By SETH BORENSTEIN The Associated Press WASHINGTON – The rapid melting in the Arctic eased up this year. But the government says global warming is still dramatically altering the top of the world, reducing the number of reindeer and shrinking snow and ice, while increasing certain fish and extending the growing season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its report card for the Arctic on Thursday, portraying 2013 as moderate compared with the roasting 2012. Overall Arctic temperatures didn’t soar quite as high,
and Greenland ice sheets and summer sea ice didn’t melt as much. “The Arctic caught a break, if you will, in 2013, but one year doesn’t change the longterm trend toward a warmer Arctic,” said report card editor Martin Jeffries, a University of Alaska geophysicist who is the science adviser to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. “The Arctic has shifted to a new normal,” Jeffries said at the American Geophysical Union scientific conference in San Francisco, where the 136page report card was released. While 2013 looks a tad cool compared with the last six years, it is unusually warm
compared with the 20th century, he said. Central Alaska’s summer was one of the warmest on record, coming months after its coldest April since 1924, NOAA said. Fairbanks experienced a record 36 days of more than 80 degrees. And snow cover in May and June was near record low levels in North America and broke a record for the least snow in Eurasia. But one of the biggest climate change indicators, summer sea ice, wasn’t as bad as expected. Sea ice in 2013 reached its sixth-lowest level in the three decades that NOAA has been keeping
track. That’s up from the lowest ever in 2012. But the seven lowest levels have all occurred in the last seven years. The 2013 figure “is simply natural variability,” said National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze, who wasn’t part of the NOAA report but praised it. “There is nothing about the year 2013 that provides any evidence that the Arctic is starting a path toward recovery.” He added: “Looking back 20 years from now, the world will be warmer and we’ll have much less sea ice than today. We’ll see that 2013 was just a temporary respite.”
Interpreter at Mandela event was hallucinating The ASSOCIATED PRESS JOHANNESBURG – The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial says he suffers from schizophrenia and hallucinated and saw angels while gesturing incoherently just 3 feet away from President Barack Obama and other world leaders, outraging deaf people worldwide who said his signs amounted to gibberish. South African officials scrambled Thursday to explain how they came to hire the man and said they were investigating what vetting process, if any, he underwent for his security clearance. “In the process, and in the speed of the event, a mistake happened,” deputy Cabinet minister Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu said. She apologized to deaf people around the world who were offended by the incomprehensible signing. However, she declined to say whether a government department, the presidency or the ruling African National Congress party was responsible for hiring the sign in-
AP photo
Thamsanqa Jantjie gestures at his home during an interview Thursday with the Associated Press in Johannesburg, South Africa. Jantjie, the man accused of faking sign interpretation next to world leaders at Nelson Mandela’s memorial, told a local newspaper that he was hallucinating and hearing voices. terpreter, telling reporters it isn’t the time to “point fingers and vilify each other and start shouting.” The man at the center of the controversy said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday that he began hallucinating while onstage in the stadium filled with tens of thousands of people and that he tried not to panic because there were “armed po-
licemen around me.” Thamsanqa Jantjie added that he has schizophrenia, was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for 19 months and has been violent in the past. The disclosures raised serious security concerns for Obama, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other dignitaries who stood next to Jantjie as they eulogized Man-
dela at FNB Stadium in Soweto, the black township at the center of the struggle against racist white rule. Mandela died on Dec. 5 at 95. In Washington, Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said vetting for criminal history and other appropriate background checks of the people onstage were the responsibility of the South Africans. He added that Secret Service agents are “always in close proximity to the president.” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to comment on how South Africa handled the hiring of the translator. However, he added: “If in fact the individual was not signing, that’s unfortunate because that meant that people who rely on sign language to follow the speeches were not able to.” Jantjie has been seen on video performing sign language interpretation at other prominent events in South Africa criticized as fake by advocates for the deaf, including at an appearance last December with South African President Jacob Zuma.
Daily Chronicle / Daily-Chronicle.com
8WORLD BRIEFS At parley, Palestinians cite lack of shared vision DOHA, Qatar – An unprecedented gathering of top Palestinian politicians and academics this week suggested that the split between Islamists and secular nationalists has hardened into permanence. There was an overwhelming sense of a national movement in crisis at the conference in Qatar – despite the intensity of the current mediation by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who returned to the region Thursday for his ninth trip this year, less than a week after his last effort. The clear sentiment at the Doha conference was that Israeli-Palestinian talks, now in their fifth month, cannot succeed. That left Fatah, the nationalist party that essentially controls the Palestinian autonomous zones in the West Bank, with a feeling of impasse. Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip in 2007 but is increasingly isolated and besieged, is hardly more ebullient. The lack of a shared vision – the Islamic militant group depends on force and Fatah continues to negotiate – only deepens the sense of fragmentation, said participants.
Putin defends Russian conservative values MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin defended his government’s promotion of conservative values, chiding the West for treating “good and evil” equally. Russia has faced Western criticism over a law banning “propaganda of non-traditional relations,” which gay rights groups say has given a green light to harassment and intimidation. Putin said Thursday in his annual state-of-the-nation
address that Russia will carry on defending traditional family values. Quoting an early 20th century Russian philosopher, he said conservatism does not stop society from progressing but prevents it from falling backward into “chaotic darkness and the state of primitive man.”
Grass-roots protests spread through Italy SOAVE, Italy – For the first time in the five years of Italy’s economic crisis, grass-roots protests expressing frustration and anger at Italy’s political class are spreading across the nation. Students were marching through cities and towns, small business owners were blocking highway entrances and demonstrators even tried to close the border with France. The single aim: to send all the politicians home in a bid to end the country’s malaise. The “Pitchfork Protests” were in their fourth day Thursday, reflecting the deepening pain spread by Italy’s recession.
Bangladesh executes opposition leader DHAKA, Bangladesh – Bangladesh executed an opposition leader convicted of war crimes hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal. An intelligence official said the hanging of Abdul Quader Mollah took place Thursday night in a jail in Dhaka. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. Mollah is the first person executed after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2010 began trying people suspected of war crimes. Most of the defendants are opposition members.
– Wire reports