The once mighty Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptized, is now little more than a polluted stream that could die next year unless the decay is halted, environmentalists said yesterday.
The famed river “has been reduced to a trickle south of the Sea of Galilee, devastated by over exploitation, pollution and lack of regional management,” Friends of the Earth, Middle East (FoEME) said in a report.
More than 98 percent of the river’s flow has been diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan over the years.
“The remaining flow consists primarily of sewage, fish pond water, agricultural run-off and saline water,” the environmentalists from Israel, Jordan and the West Bank said in the report to be presented in Amman yesterday. “Without concrete action, the LJR [lower Jordan River] is expected to run dry at the end of 2011.”
The river — which runs 217km from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea — and its tributaries are shared by Israel, Jordan, Syria and the West Bank.
In 1847, a US naval officer who led an expedition along the river described navigating down cascading rapids and waterfalls. Today the Jordan is a brackish stream barely a few meters wide.
Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian communities along the lower Jordan river — about 340,000 people in all — dump raw sewage into the river.
Ironically, if the sewage stops flowing into the river — which Israel plans to do on its stretch — the damage could be even greater unless additional measures are taken to reduce the salinity of the water.
FoEME believes the solution lies in releasing huge amounts of fresh water into the river.
The Jordan once had a flow of 1.3 billion cubic meters a year, but now discharges only an estimated 20 million to 30 million cubic meters into the Dead Sea.
“A new study we commissioned reveals that we have lost at least 50 percent of biodiversity in and around the river due to the near total diversion of fresh water, and that some 400 million cubic meters of water annually are urgently needed to be returned to the river to bring it back to life,” said Munqeth Mehyar, FoEME’s Jordanian director.
Israel, Syria, Jordan must all return water to the ailing river, the report says.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
RSS