BEN
BOTANICAL ELECTRONIC NEWS


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

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 arbuscular 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 List WWW Sites of Interest to Ecologists

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

Submissions, subscriptions, etc.: aceska@freenet.victoria.bc.ca BEN is archived on gopher freenet.victoria.bc.ca. The URL is: gopher://freenet.victoria.bc.ca:70/11/environment/Botany/ben

http://www.ou.edu/cas/botany-micro/ben/ben118.html