He believed people had realised the fact candidates had lied to them during the previous elections and failed address their problems

By Balqis Omaryar

KABUL - The voter turnout in Saturday’s parliamentary elections was 50 percent lower than the 2004 ballot when 8.5 million people exercised their franchise right, an official said on Thursday.

About 4.5 million people took part in parliamentary polls, showing exactly a 50 percent decrease in the turnout, said Muhammad Fahim Hakim, who served as a member of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) in last year’s presidential poll.

“In the first presidential elections in 2004 and the parliamentary polls the same year, the total number of eligible voters was 12 million,” he told Pajhwok Afghan News.

During the presidential elections, 70 percent people had voted, compared to 50 percent in the parliamentary ballot the same year, he explained.

In the 2009 presidential elections, only five million of 17.5 million eligible voters cast their ballots. “For the September 18 parliamentary elections, 11.4 million people were eligible to vote across the country, but only 4.5 million cast ballots,” the official added.

A political and economic analyst, Abdul Sattar Sadat, linked the low turnout to the deteriorating security situation. He believed people had realised the fact candidates had lied to them during the previous elections and failed address their problems.

Article taken from RAWA News, available here.

With BP’s blown-out well finally dead, damage assessment takes centre stage

Sep 23rd 2010 | BATON ROUGE

IN A sun-dappled corner of Louisiana State University, two scientists are puzzling over shrimp (prawns). The state’s fisheries department keeps extensive historical records of average shrimp weights—it uses the figures to set the opening date of the shrimping season—and the researchers reckon that if this year’s shrimp turn out to be especially tiny, that might suggest that they had been exposed to oil after the explosion on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, which created the worst oil spill in America’s history. That might mean reduced fecundity, and a smaller shrimp population next year. And that might imply medium-term consequences for the Gulf’s shrimp population. But it is, they add, too early to tell. “This whole story so far is a lot of ifs, and based on those ifs, other ifs,” sighs one.

On September 19th, nearly five months after the spill started, BP, the company leasing the rig, finally sealed the Macondo well. An adjoining relief well had already been completed, and Macondo got a final wallop of cement. This is the coup de grâce. A temporary containment cap was placed over the wellhead in July, and a cement filling was installed in August.

Now more efforts will turn to assessing and compensating for the damage, which involves several things happening at once. The Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), quantifies the damage and what it might cost to fix it. It figures out BP’s bill, in other words. Alongside this, an army of federal and state agencies, government researchers, academic scientists and independent advocates works on pieces of the picture: whether sampled fish show traces of oil in their gall bladders, whether whales are avoiding their usual mating grounds, whether water samples contain more hydrocarbons than would occur from natural seepage. BP has also pledged to spend $50m a year for the next ten years on its own independent research effort, as well as supplying scientists for what the NOAA is doing.

Estimating the size of the spill was an essential first step. On August 2nd the National Incident Command (the government body set up to co-ordinate the response) estimated that the spill amounted to a total of 4.9m barrels of oil. NOAA added an account of where it all went: a quarter dissolved or evaporated by natural means; 17% was siphoned up from the wellhead; 8% was burned off or skimmed up; 16% was dispersed (broken down into tiny droplets) naturally; 8% was dispersed through the prodigious application of chemicals. The remaining 26%, according to NOAA, is spread around: some shimmering on the surface as sheen, some washing up as tarballs, some buried in layers of sediment on the sea floor.

Non-government scientists worry that the spillage estimate is too small. And the dispersed oil has not exactly gone: it simply has a better chance of biodegrading, and less chance of coming ashore. This process is already well under way: the gulf is full of bacteria that happily chomp oil, if they get it in tiny specks. Earlier this month the Joint Analysis Group, another government outfit, reported that the levels of oxygen in the sea were about 20% below normal, though not low enough to endanger marine life. That suggests that the bacteria are indeed at work. Presented with a sudden food source, they are gobbling away, using lots of oxygen to digest it.

James Cowan, a Louisiana State oceanographer, is more critical of the use of chemical dispersants. The lighter bits of the dispersed oil may be eaten by bacteria, or will rise to the sea surface, to weather or evaporate. But he reckons that the heavy parts have simply sunk to the bottom. From there, they could still work their way into the food chain.

Dispersal was a strategic calculation. In the weeks after the spill, the paramount concern was to keep the oil away from Louisiana’s fragile coastline, away from nesting turtles, away from Alabama’s white-sand beaches and away from the cameras. Those were serious concerns. Some of the turtles are endangered. And Louisiana is already losing wetland: an area about the size of a football field every 30 minutes. The Mississippi River, which used to sweep up dirt in one stretch of the delta only to deposit it in another, has now been channelled, for flood-prevention, to wash the land into the sea. The oil that has reached the shore may exacerbate the problem of land loss by poisoning the marsh grasses that hold the delicate coastal sands and silts together.

It is quite likely, though, that the damage will be a lot less than was feared as the oil was gushing. No hurricanes came to push the slick inland, and most of the oil has been successfully kept offshore. So far there has been no discernible effect on fish stocks and almost all the fisheries have now reopened. But it is still early days. Any trouble that may lurk deep in the sea will remain obscure for some time yet.

Taken from The Economist. Article available here.