Volume 14/Number l/January 1983

on the bank opposite Szentendre, with a main conduit running inland 18 km to Goedoelloe, supplying local villages with water. The construction costs (Ft 160 million), to be met jointly by central government (two-thirds) and the develop- ment fund of the Waterworks enterprise (one-third), are ironically a mere Ft 15 million in excess of the financial penalties so far imposed on the Chinoin plant.

VERA RICH

Round-the-World News USA The US Department of Justice is taking legal action to recover $5.3m in oil pollution costs incurred in clean-up operations following the collision of the Liberian tanker Burmah Agate with the freighter Mimosa which led to the spillage of 10.4m gallons of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico off Galveston Bay. More than 45 km of Texas shoreline was impacted by drifting oil following the accident in November 1979.

Mediterranean The Regional Oil Combating Centre for the Mediterranean Sea (ROCC) received reports of twelve oil spills and four potential spill incidents between July 1981 and June 1982. Three of the spills involved tanker groundings and three were the result of tanker fires or explosions. An oil spill response training course sponsored by ROCC and held in Marseille was attended by officials from 12 countries.

Australia A new water research centre which will initially concentrate on water resources, coastal pollution and use of the conti- nental shelf has been established in Perth, Western Austra- lia, under the joint direction of Professor J. Dunberger and Professor A. McKomb from the University of Australia.

Hungary A meeting of environmental biologists and limnologists from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary held recently in Veszprem (Hungary) noted a recent increase in the heavy metal content of water in a number of regions of central Europe, in particular, Lakes Balaton and Ferto in Hungary, the Masurian Lakes in Poland, and the agricultural area in Czechoslovakia where the Vltava flows into the Labe.

VERA RICH

Peru In a bid to document the decline of the Humboldt penguin in Peru, visitors to the country are asked to send any counts

they have made to Dr D. C. Duffy, Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, South Africa, or to Coppelia Hays, Zoology Dept., University of Florida, Gainesville, USA.

Marine Tailings Disposal The XIV International Mineral Processing Congress, Toronto, 17-23 September 1982, included a " Round Table Seminar on Submarine and Lake Disposal of Mill Tailing". The Panel included scientists and engineers from Canada, USA, USSR and Denmark. A review of 25 mines known to be discharging to lakes and the sea was distributed prior to the Congress and will be revised for the Congress Proceedings. Panelists answered a set of questions ranging over topics of mill processing and contamination chemistry to fishery resource losses and public health implications. It appears that no case of human health impact from such tailings disposal has occurred, but that some fishery resources have been degraded. Bioaccumulation of trace metals is frequent but does not inevitably occur and is unlikely to have social implications unless followed by biomagnification. The representative from the USSR expressed the point of view that marine disposal of mill tailing was in contravention of international agreements over ocean dumping. It was noted that the Panel's Pre-print and a 1982 book, Marine Tailings Disposal (D. V. Ellis, Ed.), published by Ann Arbor Science Press, were the only recent publicly available compendia of information on the novel engineering and environmental quality control systems developed over the past decade for new coastal mines in Canada, Greenland and elsewhere.

DEREK ELLIS

The 2nd International Symposium on industrial and hazardous solid waste disposal will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA from 6 to 11 March 1983.

Further information from ASTM, 1916 Race Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA.

Conservation, development and utilization of Pacific resources is the theme of the 15th Pacific Science Congress to be held in Dunedin, New Zealand, from 1 to 11 February 1983.