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...After nearly a decade of research, teams of scientists said yesterday that they had re-created the historic influenza virus that by some estimates killed 50 million people world-wide in 1918 and 1919. The scientists concluded that the virus originated as an avian bug and then adapted and spread in humans by undergoing much simpler changes than many experts had previously thought were needed for a pandemic. Some mutations of the 1918 virus have been detected in the current avian-flu virus, suggesting the bug "might be going down a similar path that led to 1918,".... The studies, published yesterday in the...

OSLO (Reuters) - Inuit hunters threatened by a melting of the Arctic ice plan to file a petition accusing Washington of violating their human rights by fueling global warming, an Inuit leader said Wednesday. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), also said Washington was hindering work to follow up a 2004 report by 250 scientists that said the thaw could make the Arctic Ocean ice-free in summer by 2100. Watt-Cloutier, in Oslo to receive an environmental prize, said the Inuits' planned petition to the 34-member Organization of American States (OAS) could put pressure on the United States...

KUUJJUAQ, Nunavik - ''I have nothing, I have nothing,'' Johnny Munick cried out, remembering the day in 1960 when his team of sled dogs, in their harnesses and ready for a hunting trip, was shot by government authorities. The incident was part of an extermination of Inuit huskies - and, as a result, the abrupt end of their owners' ability to provide for their families - that took place from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s. Arms flung wide, an anguished figure in a heavy black parka, the elderly Inuk was standing on the auditorium stage following the Jan. 19...

An Inuit group says that climate change is jeopardizing its people's livelihood--and that U.S. gas emissions are to blame. Feb. 3 - The Inuit living in some of the world’s iciest regions are feeling the effects of global warming. The ice caps where they hunt are thawing earlier every year; polar bears are hunting in unfamiliar places; non-indigenous species are being seen in the Arctic and last summer local inhabitants saw their first wasp on Canada’s Baffin Island. None of this is news to global-climate experts, who are meeting this week in Exeter, England, to discuss the scope and rate...

OSLO (Reuters) - World temperatures could surge in just two decades to a threshold likely to trigger dangerous disruptions to the earth's climate, the WWF environmental group said on Sunday. It said the Arctic region was warming fastest, threatening the livelihoods of indigenous hunters by thawing the polar ice-cap and driving species like polar bears toward extinction by the end of the century. "If nothing is done, the earth will have warmed by 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by some time between 2026 and 2060," the WWF said in a report. Few scientists have estimated such an early...

The Maori Party is already driving a larger and considerably more dangerous wedge into the New Zealand Left than anything so far inserted by the National Party. As it grows in strength and consolidates its already powerful grip on the Maori imagination, the Maori Party has the potential to split Labour into two hostile camps, aggravate racial sensitivities within the trade union movement, and push the Greens below the all-important 5% MMP threshold. The Left's vulnerability to the Maori Party is entirely of its own making. From the early-1980s, the critical "sites of struggle" for most progressive political activists shifted...

Inuit 'Poisoned from Afar' Due to Climate Change 2 hours, 1 minute ago By Amran Abocar TORONTO (Reuters) - The Inuit living in the Arctic region are being "poisoned from afar" as climate change takes its toll on the area and threatens their existence, the head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference said on Wednesday. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairwoman of the group that represents about 155,000 Inuit in the Arctic regions of Canada, Russia, Greenland and the United States, said Inuit were paying dearly for the actions of people elsewhere. "The Inuit have now become the net recipients of toxins coming from...

DNA tests debunk blond Inuit legend Last Updated Tue, 28 Oct 2003 11:36:10 CAMBRIDGE BAY, NUNAVUT - Two Icelandic scientists have shot holes in the theory of the missing Norse tribes of the Arctic. Agnar Helgason and Gisli Palsson say their DNA tests have failed to find any evidence that Europeans mingled genetically with Inuit half a millennium ago. Agnar Helgason The scientists made the statement after a visit to Cambridge Bay last week. Rumours of blue-eyed, blond-haired Inuit have circulated through the Arctic since the turn of the century. They were thought to possibly descend from a group of...

DNA study to settle ancient mystery about mingling of Inuit, Vikings By BOB WEBER (CP) - A centuries-old Arctic mystery may be weeks away from resolution as an Icelandic anthropologist prepares to release his findings on the so-called "Blond Eskimos" of the Canadian North. "It's an old story," says Gisli Palsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. "We want to try to throw new light on the history of the Inuit." Stories about Inuit with distinct European features - blue eyes, fair hair, beards - living in the central Arctic have their roots in ancient tales of Norse settlements...

The Inuit are warning the federal government that allowing gays and lesbians to marry would conflict with a traditional way of life that is based on survival and procreation. In the Baffin Island community of Iqaluit, population 6,000, Inuit leaders gathered in a local hotel yesterday to make presentations to the House of Commons justice committee as it wrapped up cross-country hearings with a rare trip to the north. Speaking through an interpreter in her native language of Inuktitut, Kanayuk Salomonie said homosexuality is very much in the closet around the Nunavut capital, and that's where it should stay. "We...