| News in Brief |
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It’s the most famous river in the Bible – and possibly in the world. But the river Jordan, where Jesus was baptised, is on  the verge of drying up completely, environmentalists say. A joint Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian scientific team says large stretches of the river could dry up by 2011. Much of what remains isn’t pure, but is made up of sewage and farm waste. “You can almost jump across this river. In other places, you don’t need to even jump – you can just cross it. It’s ankle deep,” according to Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. In another sign of changing times, Israel’s government has banned fishing for the famous St Peter’s fish in the sea of Galilee. The fish has been caught there for thousands of years, but stocks have fallen dramatically because of over-fishing and a man-made shift in the balance of nature. When Saddam Hussein set fire to Kuwait’s oil wells in 1991, the resulting cloud of smoke permanently diverted migration routes of up to 10,000 hungry cormorants, which now fly up the African Rift Valley to the Sea of Galilee and guzzle its fish.
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