BRUSSELS (AP) ? The European Union placed the military wing of the Lebanese party Hezbollah on its terror list on Monday in a major policy change toward the Middle East.
The EU's 28 foreign ministers reached the decision unanimously at their monthly meeting, swiftly swaying the last nations that had any doubts.
It came after prolonged diplomatic pressure from the United States and Israel, who both consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
"The EU has sent a clear message that it stands united against terrorism," said British Foreign Secretary William Hague. "It shows that no organization can carry out terrorist acts on European soil."
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle also emphasized European unity. "We will not stand for terror in Europe," he said. "From no one."
The blacklisting entails asset freezes and paves the way for possible travel bans on individuals belonging to the military wing.
"I'm satisfied that we took this important step today, by dealing with the military wing of Hezbollah, freezing its assets, hindering its fundraising and thereby limiting its capacity to act," said Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans.
But implementation promises to be complicated as officials will have to unravel the links between the different wings within Hezbollah's organizational network and see who could be targeted for belonging to the military wing.
Diplomats late Monday were working on pinpointing the entities and organizations that make up the military wing. Because of this legal uncertainty it was unclear how many assets could be involved, and how many individuals could be eventually be targeted.
The Iranian-backed group plays a pivotal role in Lebanese politics, dominating the government since 2011. It has since sent its members to bolster Syria's President Bashar Assad forces in their assault of rebel-held areas.
Walid Sukariyeh, a pro-Hezbollah legislator who belongs to the group's bloc, said the European decision came as a result of American pressure.
"Europe tried to have an independent stance away from America's diction but I believe by this stance it has abandoned its independence and the independence of its policy," he said.
"Hezbollah did not carry out any terrorist attacks, neither in Europe nor outside Europe. Hezbollah is a resistance movement that fought to liberate occupied land from the Israeli enemy," Sukariyeh said.
Israel welcomed the European decision. It fought a bitter month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 and does not differentiate between the group's political and military wings. Israel has accused Hezbollah of carrying out attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets around the world. Hezbollah has denied involvement in some and not commented on others.
"Finally, after years of deliberation, the claim that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party has rightfully failed," said Israel's Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. "Now it is clear to the entire world that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization."
The group has been accused of involvement in last year's attack in the Black Sea resort of Burgas in Bulgaria, which killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian. It has refuted that allegation.
Westerwelle said the evidence from the attack on EU member Bulgaria was enough of an impetus for the blacklisting. A Cyprus criminal court decision in March finding a Hezbollah member guilty of helping to plan attacks on Israelis on the Mediterranean island also galvanized EU diplomacy.
Several EU nations have pointed to Hezbollah's involvement in Syria as further reason for the move.
As Hezbollah's hand in the Syrian conflict has become public, Lebanon has seen a spike in Sunni-Shiite tensions that has sparked gun battles in several cities around the country. Many Lebanese Sunnis support the overwhelmingly Sunni uprising against Assad in Syria, while Shiites generally back Hezbollah and the regime in Damascus.
The EU only came to a united stand after it became clear that political channels would remain open with all players in Lebanon.
"Designation will do nothing to affect the EU's and the UK's strong relationship with, and support for, Lebanon," Hague said.
___
Associated Press writers Barbara Surk and Bassem Mroue contributed from Beirut and Ian Deitch from Jerusalem.
DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - Tanzania's economy is expected to expand at a slightly faster pace over the next two years after growing 6.9 percent in 2012, the World Bank said on Tuesday.
It said it expected inflation in east Africa's second largest economy to average 5-7 percent during the same period.
"Tanzania's economy is expected to grow at an average of 7 percent in the 2013/14 and 2014/15 fiscal years," the World Bank's lead economist in Tanzania, Jacques Morisset, told reporters in Dar es Salaam.
The World Bank's economic report on Tanzania, released on Tuesday, forecasts economic growth of 7 percent in 2013/14 and 7.3 percent in 2014/15.
Morisset said inflation was expected to fall to 5-7 percent during the same period, from 9.4 percent year-on-year in April.
The World Bank added that despite excitement over Tanzania's gas discoveries, economic growth is likely to be driven by five key sectors: communications, transport, construction, manufacturing and financial services.
"The boom in natural gas production may eventually result in an even higher rate of growth, but this will not occur for 7-10 years," said the World Bank.
Gas strikes off east Africa's seaboard have led to predictions the region could become the world's third-largest exporter of natural gas. Tanzania estimates it has more than 40 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of recoverable natural gas reserves.
The World Bank said inefficiency at Tanzania's main port in Dar es Salaam is causing it and six neighbouring countries up to $2.6 billion a year and warned that corruption is also making Tanzanian ports less competitive than some rivals.
Thanks for visiting the broad arena of house domestic plumbing. Plumbing related covers a variety of difficult machines and equipment. Domestic plumbing is actually a personalized matter when confronted with home improvement, so it will be not at all times easy to find what works for you. These post might help present you with with advice.
Noisy water lines that can make squeaking or hammering seems are actually much easier to solve than you would probably visualize. You need to anchor all uncovered pipes.
Knowing what tools and how to make use of them could make you significantly better at pipes. Well before undertaking repairs on your own, you should have a strategy or else, or you could make a costly mistake.
Don?t use any tinted pills within your potty. These products may well eliminate scents, nevertheless they can very seriously problems the rubber items within the bathroom, that may prevent your toilet from working correctly.
Routine every one of the plumbing related function concurrently. You could be tempted to phone the local plumber each time you need something repaired, but if you have problems mended at the same time, it can save you up money for maintenance. Most plumbers charge a per hour rate plus a smooth amount for the journey: requesting a local plumber to fix several troubles in just one pay a visit to to your house.
The installation of shower heads will save you a lot of money in terms of your energy bill. Most very hot water is consumed within the shower room. When you spend numerous extra $ $ $ $ setting up power-conserving shower room heads, it will save you hundreds each and every year in your expenses.
Check the flooring inside your bathroom for soft areas round the surfaces. It will save you funds simply by observing and healing this issue as at the beginning.
Ensure that the dryer?s lint snare. This will assist your clothes dryer to function greater and prevents fires.Make sure you inspect your lint trap for tears or openings that can suggest lint is certainly going in your piping, because this may cause larger troubles as it can certainly imply that lint is escaping in your pipes.
Tend not to be prepared to nice and clean grout through your pipes. You can test to break it up the line. This functions much better if your home has piping are plastic as opposed to plastic-type material.
Don?t bother flowing water by using your junk convenience can be used. Occasionally, it may lead to trash to adhere to your removal, and contribute to long term issues.
Nice and clean your dryer?s lint filtration system. This will assist your clothes dryer runs efficiently and might also prevent fires. Be sure you look into the trap for tears and rips, that may cause clogs and issues.
Will not anticipate to clean grout through your domestic plumbing. You are able to make an effort to dislodge the grout and trigger it go more straight down. This operates much better with plastic-type instead of it can with aluminum.
The easiest method to steer clear of plumbing related restoration bills is always to protect against problems before they occur. Clogs would be the reasons individuals have to phone a plumbing service. Drains are often get plugged by your hair. It?s a good deal much easier to get rid of your hair out of a display than eliminating them back a water pipe.
Check your bathroom routinely for virtually any leakages. Try out putting droplets of food items colouring inside the container. If you then see colored h2o within the bathroom bowl soon after, this simply means your bathroom is seeping.
Look at the taps exterior for drips before winter months freeze out. Should they be leaking or leaking, this should be set ahead of the temp falls listed below very cold. Regardless of the fabric of your respective plumbing, quite chilly h2o strain can certainly make water lines fracture.A good tiny split can make adequate h2o leak to cause a serious deluge your own home.
When you notice also a hint water inside of your surfaces, you should turn off the liquid principal and telephone a plumbing technician. This might be a signal you have some significant pipes issues. Many troubles associated with this result in mildew and fungus, mold and perhaps surging.
Lots of people don?t completely grasp pipes, hence they will pay whatever selling price the plumber demands. Should you personal your home, for you to do what you could to teach on your own about plumbing so you usually are not having a plumber?s operate and phrase on belief. This helps you to not get scammed.
An ordinary water pipe snake can nice and clean your washer.
To create your hot water heater work better, see what sizing a container your household calls for.
The original factor to consider is definitely the chain tension, but if the chain will not be the trouble, the next phase is always to check your flapper.
Typical servicing will assist stop upcoming spills in your taps and basins. A problem that will go untreated may squander a lot of normal water?just as much as 150 gallons per day! Consequently, so persistently checking your pipes and waterlines for crevices and leakages is vital.Normal routine maintenance can avoid severe put on and dress in.
The primary issue to check out will be the sequence strain, however if that?s alright, your following step is usually to look at your flapper.
The sequence within your lavatory may well not have sufficient stress, however, if that?s alright, your upcoming step is to examine your flapper.
A blow clothes dryer will help you probably have with frosty pipes. Although this may well take a moment due to the very low volume of heating, you can avoid using more hazardous strategies, and also avoid a call to have the nearby plumbing technician appear.
Above-tightening your plumbing might be just as terrible or worse than in the event you beneath-firm up it. You are able to wreck the threads or break the pipe alone, not more.
You could possibly purchase own insulating material material that wraps perfectly all around these piping.
That wasn?t awful, was it? Like most topics, domestic plumbing provides extensive information and facts accessible to study from. Just a little push from the right direction will be all it will require to get you started out. You have to have received some terrific assistance from your ideas in this post.
Look at the prevalence of Wolfson's audio chips today, in everything from audiophile DACs to smartphones like the Exynos-powered Galaxy S III and Galaxy S 4, and it's hard not to be impressed. Factor in the company's humble beginnings in 1984 as a university offshoot in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the growth story becomes even more dramatic. The company shipped its billionth chip in 2008, its 2 billionth in 2012 and now expects to sell a billion per year by 2015.
It's ironic, then, that at the start of its journey into mobile devices Wolfson actually failed to grow quickly enough, resulting in the loss of its biggest and most high-profile customer. With Apple using its chips in a number of iPods, the Scottish company just couldn't scale up to meet a sudden rush of demand. It missed some deadlines and Cuptertino left it out of the iPod Classic as it shifted its loyalty to Cirrus Logic, where it has stayed ever since. How did it recover? Where is it headed next? And how will it break Qualcomm's continuing grip on smartphone audio in the US? Read on for answers from CEO Mike Hickey.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior advisers knew in late April that an impending report was likely to say the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups, President Barack Obama's spokesman disclosed Monday, expanding the circle of top officials who knew of the audit beyond those named earlier.
But McDonough and the other advisers did not tell Obama, leaving him to learn about the politically perilous results of the internal investigation from news reports more than two weeks later, officials said.
The Treasury Department also told the White House twice in the weeks leading up to the IRS disclosure that the tax agency planned to make the targeting public, a Treasury official said.
The apparent decision to keep the president in the dark about the matter underscores the White House's cautious legal approach to controversies and reflects a desire by top advisers to distance Obama from troubles threatening his administration.
Obama spokesman Jay Carney defended keeping the president out of the loop on the Internal Revenue Service audit, saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that "some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them."
"It is absolutely a cardinal rule as we see it that we do not intervene in ongoing investigations," Carney said.
Republicans, however, are accusing the president of being unaware of important happenings in the government he oversees.
"It seems to be the answer of the administration whenever they're caught doing something they shouldn't be doing is, 'I didn't know about it'," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CBS News. "And it causes me to wonder whether they believe willful ignorance is a defense when it's your job to know."
Obama advisers argue that the outcry from Republicans would be far worse had McDonough or White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told the president about the IRS audit before it became public, thereby raising questions about White House interference.
Still, the White House's own shifting information about who knew what and when is keeping the focus of the IRS controversy on the West Wing.
When Carney first addressed the matter last week, he said only that Ruemmler had been told around April 22 that an inspector general audit was being concluded at a Cincinnati IRS office that screens applications for organizations' tax-exempt status. He said the audit was described to the counsel's office "very broadly."
But on Monday, Carney said lower-ranking staffers in the White House counsel's office first learned of the report one week earlier, on April 16. When Ruemmler was later alerted, she was told specifically that the audit was likely to conclude that IRS employees improperly scrutinized organizations by looking for words like "tea party" and "patriot." Ruemmler then told McDonough, deputy chief of staff Mark Childress, and other senior advisers, but not Obama.
The Treasury official said Monday that the department twice passed on information to the White House about the IRS' plans to disclose the political targeting. Childress and Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson were in communication on the matter, as were lawyers at both the White House and Treasury.
In the first instance, Treasury officials told the White House that Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups, was considering making a public apology in a speech.
Around the same time, Treasury relayed to the White House that Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller expected to be asked about the matter in congressional testimony on April 25, but the issue was not raised.
However, the Treasury official said the department did not tell the White House about the IRS' final decision for Lerner to apologize for the targeting during a conference on May 10. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and insisted on anonymity.
The IRS is an independent agency within the Treasury Department. Because of that independent status, the official said Treasury deferred to the IRS in its decision about how to make the targeting public.
Despite the notifications from the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, the White House insists it did not know the conclusions of the inspector general report until it was made public.
Members of Congress sent the IRS at least eight letters since 2011 asking about complaints from tea party groups that they were being harassed by the IRS. Many of those lawmakers are livid that the IRS chose to reveal that conservative groups were being targeted at a legal conference instead of telling Congress.
A new Pew Research Center poll shows 42 percent of Americans think the Obama administration was "involved" in the IRS targeting of conservative groups, while 31 percent say it was a decision made solely by employees at the IRS.
The IRS matter is one of three controversies that have consumed the White House over the past week. In each instance, officials have tried to put distance between the president and questionable actions by people within his administration.
As with the IRS investigation, the White House says Obama learned only from news reporters that the Justice Department had subpoenaed phone records from journalists at The Associated Press as part of a leaks investigation. And faced with new questions about the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Obama's advisers have pinned responsibility on the CIA for crafting talking points that downplayed the potential of terrorism, despite the fact that the White House was a part of the process.
Former White House officials say a president has little choice but to distance himself from investigations and then endure accusations of being out of touch, or worse.
"It's a tough balance," said Sara Taylor Fagen, who was White House political director for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007.
"With a scandal, there's no way to win," said Fagen, whom the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed and sharply questioned in a probe of dismissed U.S. attorneys. "There may never have been any wrongdoing by anyone in the White House, on any of these issues," she said, "but once the allegations are made, you can't win."
A White House peeking into an ongoing investigations can trigger a political uproar. A well-known case involved President Richard Nixon trying to hinder the FBI's probe of the Watergate break-in.
In a less far-reaching case in 2004, the Bush White House acknowledged that its counsel's office learned of a Justice Department investigation into whether Sandy Berger - the national security adviser under President Bill Clinton - had removed classified documents from the National Archives. Democrats said the White House hoped to use the information to help Bush's re-election campaign.
In the current IRS matter, two congressional committees are stepping up their investigations this week with hearings during which IRS and Treasury officials will be questioned closely about what they knew and when.
Former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman heads to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, giving lawmakers their first opportunity to question the man who ran the agency when agents were improperly targeting tea party groups. The Senate Finance Committee wants to know why Shulman didn't tell Congress - even after he was briefed in 2012 - that agents had been singling out conservative political groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
Also testifying will be Miller, who took over as acting commissioner in November, when Shulman's five-year term expired. Last week, Obama forced Miller to resign.
On Wednesday, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin will testify before the House oversight committee.
Treasury inspector general J. Russell George says he told Wolin about the subject of the IRS inquiry last summer.
In a related matter, the IRS acknowledged Monday that an official testified to Congress about tax-exempt matters long after her duties supposedly had shifted to the rollout of Obama's health care law.
Republicans point to Sarah Hall Ingram's history at IRS as they question the agency's ability to properly oversee aspects of Obama's health care overhaul. The IRS will play a major role in determining benefits and penalties under the new law.
The IRS had said last week that Ingram shifted to overseeing the health care law rollout in December 2010, well before alarm bells went off at headquarters that a unit of the tax exempt division was targeting tea party groups for extra scrutiny.
But records show she testified to Congress in her capacity as head of the tax-exempt office as recently as last year.
Monday the IRS said in a statement that Ingram "was in a unique position to testify" about tax-exempt policies in May 2012. It said Ingram "still formally held" the title of IRS commissioner of tax exempt and government entities, even though "she was assigned full-time to (health care law) activities since December 2010."
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says Congress needs to find out what Ingram and other officials knew, and when they knew it.
___
Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Jim Kuhnhenn and researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
___
Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC and Charles Babington at http://twitter.com/cbabington
Amazon River exhales virtually all carbon taken up by rain forestPublic release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Hannah Hickey hickeyh@uw.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington
The Amazon rain forest, popularly known as the lungs of the planet, inhales carbon dioxide as it exudes oxygen. Plants use carbon dioxide from the air to grow parts that eventually fall to the ground to decompose or get washed away by the region's plentiful rainfall.
Until recently people believed much of the rain forest's carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean. University of Washington research showed a decade ago that rivers exhale huge amounts of carbon dioxide though left open the question of how that was possible, since bark and stems were thought to be too tough for river bacteria to digest.
A study published this week in Nature Geoscience resolves the conundrum, proving that woody plant matter is almost completely digested by bacteria living in the Amazon River, and that this tough stuff plays a major part in fueling the river's breath.
The finding has implications for global carbon models, and for the ecology of the Amazon and the world's other rivers.
"People thought this was one of the components that just got dumped into the ocean," said first author Nick Ward, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. "We've found that terrestrial carbon is respired and basically turned into carbon dioxide as it travels down the river."
Tough lignin, which helps form the main part of woody tissue, is the second most common component of terrestrial plants. Scientists believed that much of it got buried on the seafloor to stay there for centuries or millennia. The new paper shows river bacteria break it down within two weeks, and that just 5 percent of the Amazon rainforest's carbon ever reaches the ocean.
"Rivers were once thought of as passive pipes," said co-author Jeffrey Richey, a UW professor of oceanography. "This shows they're more like metabolic hotspots."
When previous research showed how much carbon dioxide was outgassing from rivers, scientists knew it didn't add up. They speculated there might be some unknown, short-lived carbon source that freshwater bacteria could turn into carbon dioxide.
"The fact that lignin is proving to be this metabolically active is a big surprise," Richey said. "It's a mechanism for the rivers' role in the global carbon cycle it's the food for the river breath."
The Amazon alone discharges about one-fifth of the world's freshwater and plays a large role in global processes, but it also serves as a test bed for natural river ecosystems.
Richey and his collaborators have studied the Amazon River for more than three decades. Earlier research took place more than 500 miles upstream. This time the U.S. and Brazilian team sought to understand the connection between the river and ocean, which meant working at the mouth of the world's largest river a treacherous study site.
"There's a reason that no one's really studied in this area," Ward said. "Pulling it off has been quite a challenge. It's a humongous, sloppy piece of water."
The team used flat-bottomed boats to traverse the three river mouths, each so wide that you cannot see land, in water so rich with sediment that it looks like chocolate milk. Tides raise the ocean by 30 feet, reversing the flow of freshwater at the river mouth, and winds blow at up to 35 mph.
Under these conditions, Ward collected river water samples in all four seasons. He compared the original samples with ones left to sit for up to a week at river temperatures. Back at the UW, he used newly developed techniques to scan the samples for some 100 compounds, covering 95 percent of all plant-based lignin. Previous techniques could identify only 1 percent of the plant-based carbon in the water.
Based on the results, the authors estimate that about 45 percent of the Amazon's lignin breaks down in soils, 55 percent breaks down in the river system, and 5 percent reaches the ocean, where it may break down or sink to the ocean floor.
"People had just assumed, 'Well, it's not energetically feasible for an organism to break lignin apart, so why would they?'" Ward said. "We're thinking that as rain falls over the land it's taking with it these lignin compounds, but it's also taking with it the bacterial community that's really good at eating the lignin."
###
The research was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Research Council for the State of So Paulo. Co-authors are Richard Keil at the UW; Patricia Medeiros and Patricia Yager at the University of Georgia; Daimio Brito and Alan Cunha at the Federal University of Amap in Brazil; Thorsten Dittmar at Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany; and Alex Krusche at University of So Paulo in Brazil.
For more information, contact Ward at nickward@uw.edu or 858-531-1558 and Richey at jrichey@uw.edu or 206-368-1906.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Amazon River exhales virtually all carbon taken up by rain forestPublic release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Hannah Hickey hickeyh@uw.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington
The Amazon rain forest, popularly known as the lungs of the planet, inhales carbon dioxide as it exudes oxygen. Plants use carbon dioxide from the air to grow parts that eventually fall to the ground to decompose or get washed away by the region's plentiful rainfall.
Until recently people believed much of the rain forest's carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean. University of Washington research showed a decade ago that rivers exhale huge amounts of carbon dioxide though left open the question of how that was possible, since bark and stems were thought to be too tough for river bacteria to digest.
A study published this week in Nature Geoscience resolves the conundrum, proving that woody plant matter is almost completely digested by bacteria living in the Amazon River, and that this tough stuff plays a major part in fueling the river's breath.
The finding has implications for global carbon models, and for the ecology of the Amazon and the world's other rivers.
"People thought this was one of the components that just got dumped into the ocean," said first author Nick Ward, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. "We've found that terrestrial carbon is respired and basically turned into carbon dioxide as it travels down the river."
Tough lignin, which helps form the main part of woody tissue, is the second most common component of terrestrial plants. Scientists believed that much of it got buried on the seafloor to stay there for centuries or millennia. The new paper shows river bacteria break it down within two weeks, and that just 5 percent of the Amazon rainforest's carbon ever reaches the ocean.
"Rivers were once thought of as passive pipes," said co-author Jeffrey Richey, a UW professor of oceanography. "This shows they're more like metabolic hotspots."
When previous research showed how much carbon dioxide was outgassing from rivers, scientists knew it didn't add up. They speculated there might be some unknown, short-lived carbon source that freshwater bacteria could turn into carbon dioxide.
"The fact that lignin is proving to be this metabolically active is a big surprise," Richey said. "It's a mechanism for the rivers' role in the global carbon cycle it's the food for the river breath."
The Amazon alone discharges about one-fifth of the world's freshwater and plays a large role in global processes, but it also serves as a test bed for natural river ecosystems.
Richey and his collaborators have studied the Amazon River for more than three decades. Earlier research took place more than 500 miles upstream. This time the U.S. and Brazilian team sought to understand the connection between the river and ocean, which meant working at the mouth of the world's largest river a treacherous study site.
"There's a reason that no one's really studied in this area," Ward said. "Pulling it off has been quite a challenge. It's a humongous, sloppy piece of water."
The team used flat-bottomed boats to traverse the three river mouths, each so wide that you cannot see land, in water so rich with sediment that it looks like chocolate milk. Tides raise the ocean by 30 feet, reversing the flow of freshwater at the river mouth, and winds blow at up to 35 mph.
Under these conditions, Ward collected river water samples in all four seasons. He compared the original samples with ones left to sit for up to a week at river temperatures. Back at the UW, he used newly developed techniques to scan the samples for some 100 compounds, covering 95 percent of all plant-based lignin. Previous techniques could identify only 1 percent of the plant-based carbon in the water.
Based on the results, the authors estimate that about 45 percent of the Amazon's lignin breaks down in soils, 55 percent breaks down in the river system, and 5 percent reaches the ocean, where it may break down or sink to the ocean floor.
"People had just assumed, 'Well, it's not energetically feasible for an organism to break lignin apart, so why would they?'" Ward said. "We're thinking that as rain falls over the land it's taking with it these lignin compounds, but it's also taking with it the bacterial community that's really good at eating the lignin."
###
The research was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Research Council for the State of So Paulo. Co-authors are Richard Keil at the UW; Patricia Medeiros and Patricia Yager at the University of Georgia; Daimio Brito and Alan Cunha at the Federal University of Amap in Brazil; Thorsten Dittmar at Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany; and Alex Krusche at University of So Paulo in Brazil.
For more information, contact Ward at nickward@uw.edu or 858-531-1558 and Richey at jrichey@uw.edu or 206-368-1906.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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