NUCLEAR NEW MEXICO
Cannon considered for nuclear reactor The secretary of the Air Force says Cannon Air Force Base could be the future home of a nuclear reactor, but other Air Force officials cautioned Friday that it’s too early to speculate on location, even if a reactor is built. Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne was quoted in a copyrighted story by InsideDefense saying, “The thoughts are, right now, we’re talking about Cannon out in New Mexico and Mountain Home up in Idaho.” InsideDefense is an Internet news service covering defense and the aerospace industry. The story also reported Air Force officials plan to sign a letter of intent with members of the nuclear power industry by November in the hopes of ensuring “at least one small, next-generation nuclear-power plant on an Air Force base in the coming decades,” will be maintained by the next presidential administration. The Air Force said U.S. Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Pete Domenici, R-N.M., suggested nuclear energy to the military branch about a year ago and they began exploring the possibility....
N.M. among sites considered for uranium enrichment factory A company is considering building a $2 billion uranium enrichment factory in southern New Mexico, the same general area where another company already is building one. The proposed factory would enrich uranium provided by utilities to fuel their commercial nuclear reactors, said Nancy Lang, external communications manager of Areva Inc., based in Bethesda, Md. Areva Inc., a subsidiary of Paris-based Areva, also is mulling possible sites in Idaho, Ohio, Texas and Washington state, she said Friday. The company hopes to select a site "in the coming weeks," said Lang, who declined to pinpoint the New Mexico site under consideration. Areva Inc. would employ about 1,000 people during the factory's construction and about 250 people when the facility is in regular operation, she said. The market for nuclear fuel is expected to increase as global warming concerns make nuclear energy more popular. Mining companies have been showing renewed interest in uranium in the Grants area of northwestern New Mexico as the price has hovered around $90 to $100 a pound. Louisiana Energy Services is building its $1.5 billion National Enrichment Facility on one square mile of desert in southeastern New Mexico five miles east of the small community of Eunice. The factory will make fuel for commercial nuclear power plants....
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Friday, March 07, 2008
Bush insists on carbon reductions from emerging economies President George W Bush on Wednesday told an international energy conference in Washington that any plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions must include commitments from emerging economies, like China and India. "Should there be an international agreement? Yes, there should be, and we support it," Bush told the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC), stressing an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol on climate change must be focused on results. "In order for there to be effective international agreements, it must include - these agreements must include commitments, solid commitments, by every major economy, and no country should get a free ride," he said. The issue has been a sticking point in crafting an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which the US has not ratified. The US insists developing nations be given targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions alongside developed countries in any new agreement to replace Kyoto, which expires in 2012....
Can states cut carbon? EPA says no The political tussle over whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant subject to government regulation has gone on for years. Early in his first term as vice president, Al Gore pushed a tax on CO2. Democrats and Republicans in Congress were both skeptical. The idea went nowhere. As a presidential candidate, George Bush seemed to think regulating CO2 was a good idea. At least he said so. After his election, then-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Christie Whitman marched forth in support of what she thought was White House policy. She quickly got reeled back. Two years later she resigned, complaining that Vice President Dick Cheney kept pushing for weaker air pollution controls. Fast forward to the present, and the fight continues – this time pitting the Bush administration against a group of 19 governors led by Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) of California....
What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? The final morning of the conference began with a rousing speech by Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. He made it clear that to call him a global warming skeptic would be a bit of an understatement. A point Klaus makes crystal clear in his just published book, Blue Planet in Green Chains - What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? "My answer is clear and resolute: 'it is our freedom.' I may also add 'and our prosperity,'" declared Klaus. Klaus noted that ideological environmentalism appeals to the same sort of people who have always been attracted to collectivist ideas. He warned that environmentalism at its worst is just the latest dogma to claim that a looming "crisis" requires people to sacrifice their prosperity and their freedoms for the greater good. Let me quote Klaus at length. "Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical—the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality," warned Klaus. "What I have in mind [is], of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism." Klaus added, "What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project."....
Grand Canyon flushed with millions of litres of water More than one million litres per second of water were unleashed on the Grand Canyon Wednesday in a scientific experiment designed to rebuild beaches used by wildlife and visitors alike. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the flood of water released into the canyon from the upstream Glen Canyon Dam was an attempt to recreate a natural process that has occurred for millions of years, and the sheer volume of water being released was at a rate more than twice that of similar actions in 1996 and 2004. "The water will be released at a rate that would fill the Empire State Building within 20 minutes," said Kempthorne, who was on hand to open the jet tubes at the Glen Canyon Dam that began the process. The water will flow for 60 hours through the 446-kilometre stretch of the Colorado river that makes up the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Scientists hope the stronger surge will give them an insight into how to rebuild eroded beaches downstream in the canyon by moving sediment that has built up over the years and creating new sandbars and beaches that will benefit endangered species living in the region.
Ranchers Say Grizzly Bill is Not Enough Idaho's ranchers may get some relief from all the grizzlies this year, lawmakers are very close to giving the final approval to legislation that would pay for the livestock they've lost because of grizzly activity. But some are saying that's not going to entirely fix the problem. "They're just expensive. What goes into the feed and the care and the years that it takes is a loss it is," Rancher Deanna Orme said. Deanna and Larry Orme breath a little easier when there's snow on the ground because their cattle are wrapped in the safety of winter, and the grizzlies are still hibernating. "That is situation one grizzly bear habitat and the bear are top priority. You can't harass them. You can't shoot them," Larry Orme said. This summer the Orme's photographed the grizzlies that frequented their grazing land near Ernest Lake, quite often the bears would feed on their skittish cows. Each one a thousand dollar meal. "If I count the calf and the yearlings, probably about five, and we had several that were hit with their claws and got infected and ultimately died," Larry added. "You try to bring them home and doctor them and they're so frightened and so injured and it's a loss they never recover for some reason," Deanna said....
Agency probes wolf-baiting claims Already stained by the blood of dead wolves and suffering from a variety of other setbacks, the program to reintroduce endangered Mexican gray wolves to the Southwest is now at the center of two criminal investigations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is formally looking into the disappearance of two wolves in New Mexico and a rancher’s claim that he intentionally baited wolves in order to get them killed. “We had requests that we do a criminal investigation, and we are,” says agency spokeswoman Elizabeth Slown. In an interview last year, New Mexico ranch hand Mike Miller told High Country News that he deliberately baited a wolf with cattle in order to trigger the federal “three strikes” rule, which mandates the shooting or capturing of any wolf that kills three cows in one year’s time. Miller works for the 275,000-acre Adobe-Slash Ranch, which is owned by Mexican businessman Eloy Vallina. Miller, who has an unlisted number, could not be reached for comment, and Gene Whetten, his supervisor, declined to answer questions when contacted by HCN on Feb. 26. “Mr. Miller works for me and he’s forbidden to talk to you,” Whetten says. He alleges that the paper “fabricated” most of its story, and that the ranch is considering legal action against HCN. The criminal investigations face significant challenges, according to a Fish and Wildlife source. In interviews with law enforcement officials, Miller reportedly denied making the statements attributed to him by HCN. Furthermore, according to the Interior Department, the fact that Miller branded cattle on private land within half a mile of a known wolf den does not in itself violate federal wolf reintroduction rules, which give ranchers wide leeway in how they operate even when wolves are nearby....
House Dems want firefighting fund The federal government would revamp how it pays for firefighting and take some of the burden off the U.S. Forest Service by creating a permanent fund for devastating blazes, under legislation introduced Thursday by key House Democrats. As wildfire seasons have grown increasingly expensive over the last decade, the cost of fighting fires has eaten an ever larger portion of the Forest Service budget -- now about 48 percent of it. That has left the agency with less money for other programs and priorities. The new fund would be used only for catastrophic, emergency wildland fire suppression. It would be separate from the money budgeted each year by Congress for anticipated and predicted fire suppression activities for the Forest Service and Interior Department; that allocation would continue. The amount of money in the new fund would be appropriated annually and based on the average amounts spent by the Forest Service and Interior to suppress catastrophic fires over the preceding five fiscal years. Last year, the Forest Service spent $741 million more than budgeted and Interior spent $249 million more than budgeted for emergency wildfire suppression, or a total of nearly $1 billion. The secretaries of the departments would be able to declare fires eligible for the fund by issuing a suppression emergency declaration that would evaluate the size, severity and threat of the fire....
Rey: States that back roadless forests should pay for fire costs California and other states that want to ban road-building in large swaths of national forests should have to pay for the resulting increased costs of fighting wildfires on those federal lands, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said Thursday. Rey, the undersecretary for natural resources and the environment in charge of the U.S. Forest Service, said the Bush administration has encouraged states and local governments to offer input in the management of federal lands. But he told a Wildland Urban Interface conference that one of the unintended consequences is that state-imposed moratoriums on development in roadless areas boost the cost of fighting fires because of reduced access to housing subdivisions that sprout up on the edge of those forests. "In a number of cases, most recently in the state of California, the states have weighed in with a profound desire not to see any roadless area incurred as a broad matter of environmental priorities. And I frankly don't have any quarrel with that as a statement of environmental policy," Rey said. "However, if we are going to keep those areas completely undeveloped and not even maintain the option for access for administrative and suppression purposes, we're going to increase the cost and complexity of suppression to protect those new subdivisions. That's a given with which their is almost no dispute," he said in a speech to the conference in Reno sponsored by the International Association of Fire Chiefs....
Over the River creators share dream Finally, a water project that doesn’t use water. Instead, it will employ cables, anchors, panels of fabric and a dash of imagination. Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude explained their Over the River project to an audience of about 275 Thursday at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center. They also talked about their 50-year collaboration that has brought them worldwide fame, and a happy marriage as well. If permitting goes as planned, the project would be open for viewing for about two weeks in the summer of 2012 in the Arkansas River canyon between Canon City and Salida. The project has created both excitement and controversy in the Upper Arkansas Valley. Most of those at Thursday’s presentation fell into the excited camp. The fabric panels that would cover about 6 miles of the 40-mile reach of river would present different views to those who view it from the shore and those who travel underneath. One of the reasons the Arkansas River was chosen for the project was because it is one of the most heavily rafted rivers in the West, Christo explained. “The Gates was a winter project, this will be a summer project,” Christo said, referring to the 2005 project in New York City’s Central Park that featured 16-foot-tall gates with hanging saffron panels....
The wood and the trees The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which owns 2.6m acres (1m hectares) of Oregon, now proposes to increase the tree harvest to four-and-a-half times last year's level. It wants to clear-cut large swathes of its forests, including some ancient ones. As it admits, this would mean less space for fluffy fauna. A second review concerns the spotted owl, which some claim is threatened less by logging than by a competitor, the barred owl. The prospect of a return to mass logging delights Robbie Robinson of Starfire Lumber. “Here we are in the timber capital of the world, and I have to go to Canada to get enough wood to employ 75 people,” he complains. It also pleases rural counties, which used to derive much of their income from timber sales and now depend on handouts from Washington, DC. These have become unreliable: Oregon's politicians are still fighting to get cash for the coming financial year. Yet even those who long for a return to clear-cutting doubt that it will happen soon. If the past is any guide, environmentalists will tie it up in court. Opinions are hardening against logging: last month Eugene's city council passed a resolution against it. Faye Stewart, a Lane county commissioner who lists “saw-milling” as one of his hobbies, says that the area has filled up with people who do not want their pretty new home denuded of greenery....
Judge rules Ariz. eagles to stay on endangered list A federal court Thursday granted Arizona's bald eagles at least nine more months on the Endangered Species List. Other U.S. bald eagles came off the list in July. In a decision handed down in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Judge Mary Marguia agreed with Arizona conservation groups that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act when it refused to act on the groups' 2004 petition to review the Arizona eagles' endangered status as a distinct population. Fewer than 50 breeding pairs exist in Arizona. "Our desert nesting bald eagle has been taken off death row. It's a great day," said Dr. Robin Silver of the Center for Biological Diversity, which, with Maricopa Audubon, had sued Fish and Wildlife....
Some bald eagles raising fine families in suburbia From a nearby perch, a bald eagle keeps her yellow eyes trained on her nest. Two 5-week-old chicks waddle and stretch their wings on a platform the size of a dinette table. This bald eagle had just fed her two chicks in their nest in a pine tree in the Patriots Plantation neighborhood off Fort Johnson Road. The chicks will grow to about the same size as their parents before taking their first flight About 300 feet away, another mother cares for her young. Amy Dickson looks after her 6-week-old son, Edmund, in her Patriots Plantation home. "We're doing the same thing," Dickson said. The discovery of the James Island eagles' nest came about eight years ago, when construction began on the subdivision on one side of the nest, and a soccer complex on the other. Now, in the northern reaches of West Ashley, another nest is turning suburban. Carolina Bay at Essex, a development off Glenn McConnell Parkway, boasts an eagle nest 660 feet into the thick pine trees surrounding the subdivision. About 20 nests statewide are in the same position, said S.C. Department of Natural Resources biologist Charlotte Hope....
Polar bears and melting ice Aware of the public's affinity toward the polar bear, environmentalist litigators have adopted the bear as their vehicle — their poster species — for achieving drastic regulatory prohibitions of the everyday human activities that, in their view, are causing irreversible environmental degradation. Pursuant to that agenda, in 2005 the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to add the polar bear to the Endangered Species Act list of threatened species. Their petition claims global warming is shrinking the bears' ice floe habitat, and without the ESA's protection, the bear will decline toward extinction within the next 45 years. On this basis, in 2007 FWS proposed listing the polar bear as a threatened species. What makes the polar bear's expected listing exceptionally news worthy is that it would be the first species given ESA protection because of global warming. Although global warming is still debatable as to cause and degree, tying it by regulatory fiat to the ESA creates a new paradigm. With the listing, unprecedented forces will be unleashed that economically could bring the country to its knees. Under the ESA, listing determinations are to be based on "the best scientific" data available." FWS interprets this to mean any data that will support the listing. Under this approach, FWS can disregard the fact that there are now 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears, up from a low of 5,000-10,000 in the 1950s and '60s, and higher than at any time in the 20th century....
Stricter study of Baca refuge drilling urged The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency joined with other state and federal agencies in calling for a tougher environmental review of a plan to drill exploratory oil and gas wells deep into the Baca National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's environmental analysis of the project didn't "provide sufficient information," wrote Larry Svoboda, director of the EPA's National Environmental Policy Act program in Denver. The agency, the National Park Service, the state Division of Wildlife and Saguache County, as well as thousands of private citizens, are requesting a more thorough study. Canada-based Lexam Exploration acquired the mineral rights to the property in 2000 before the federal government bought the Baca Ranch for $33 million to preserve the region's wide-open landscape and treasured wetlands....
State budgets $2.5 million for wolf management Wyoming will spend nearly $2.5 million on wolf management during the next two years, according to a bill Gov. Dave Freudenthal signed Wednesday. Wyoming is expected to take over management of wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Area in late March following the removal of the northern Rockies gray wolf from the endangered species list. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials announced the delisting Feb. 21. Part of the money will fund salaries for a wolf management coordinator and three biologists who will oversee monitoring, research and control efforts. The bill was part of a budget package that passed both chambers last week. Wyoming Game and Fish director Terry Cleveland said the money will go exclusively for management activities in the northwest corner of the state, where wolves will be considered trophy game and a hunting license will be required to shoot them. Outside northwest Wyoming, wolves will be considered predators and people will be able to kill them any time by any means and without a license....
California Wildlife Agency Ignores Global Warming Threat The California Fish and Game Commission will vote Friday whether to accept a scientific petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity to protect the American pika under the California Endangered Species Act from the impacts of global warming. The American pika is a small mammal related to the rabbit that lives in high-elevation mountain peaks throughout California and the west and cannot withstand warm temperatures. The petition is the first to seek California Endangered Species Act protection for a species threatened by global warming. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering a similar petition to list the American pika under the federal Endangered Species Act, as well as petitions to protect other species, such as the polar bear, from the effects of climate change. “Fish and Game’s attempt to bury its head in the sand is an embarrassment to California’s efforts as a national leader in the fight against climate change,” said Brian Nowicki of the Center for Biological Diversity....The polar bear under federal law, the pika under state law...are you beginning to see a pattern here?
Ex-Ducks Unlimited official cited for shooting swan A former Nevada official of the conservation group Ducks Unlimited was cited Monday for illegally shooting a swan in an Eastern Nevada game refuge, wildlife officials said. Alexander "Shay" Byars, formerly the regional director in Nevada and Arizona for Ducks Unlimited, was cited for four misdemeanor violations in connection with the Nov. 29 incident at Ruby Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, said Rob Buonamici, chief game warden for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. Bail for the violations is $2,552, and Byars also faces a $2,000 civil assessment. "From my perspective, this is a serious violation. It's not to be taken lightly," Buonamici said. Byars, 30, was cited after Nevada wildlife officials traced him to Florida, where he had moved from his former home in the Las Vegas area shortly after the incident, Buonamici said....
Lawmakers demand USDA list beef recall stores Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded the U.S. Agriculture Department release by next week a list of stores which received the 143 million lbs of beef recalled by a California company last month, but administration officials said that may not be possible. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Agency first proposed two years ago that retail establishments which received recalled products be identified publicly, to give consumers important information more quickly. USDA had planned to begin listing retailers later this year, but lawmakers and consumer groups are now pushing the department to do it sooner following the February 17 recall by Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co of 143 million lbs of meat, mostly beef. The meat from the recall, the largest in U.S. history, was delivered to just under 10,000 suppliers who later distributed the product to restaurants, retailers and other establishments, according to USDA. Most of the meat probably already has been consumed, and no illnesses have been reported....
Congress expected to subpoena meat company chief after massive beef recall House lawmakers are expected tomorrow to order the head of the company responsible for the largest beef recall in U.S. history to appear before Congress. The subpoena, if approved, comes a little more than week after the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. chief executive didn’t show up to testify at a congressional hearing on food safety. Several food company executives were invited. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight is scheduled to vote at 9:30 a.m. to subpoena Steve Mendell, the co-owner of the plant. Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell expects lawmakers to approve the action, which will legally require Mendell to testify March 12, according to a committee spokesman....
Some Canadian cows can't enter Mexico through Texas, ag boss says The Texas agriculture commissioner on Tuesday prohibited certain Canadian cattle from crossing into Mexico through state facilities after learning that the U.S. had not approved allowing trade of some animals. Reports first indicated the U.S. had signed off on an agreement between Canada and Mexico that permitted trading of specific dairy and beef cattle under 30 months old — including breeding stock. But Todd Staples, the state's ag commissioner, learned that U.S. Department of Agriculture officials had not approved the deal. Currently, Mexico only allows U.S. dairy heifers under the age of 24 months to be imported, despite in-depth international negotiations to broaden this to breeding stock. The trading agreement, Staples said in a statement, is not consistent with international standards set by the World Organisation of Animal Health. If the USDA permits the cattle to cross into this country from Mexico, they won't come through any of Texas' livestock export facilities along the border, according to the statement. The export sites are in Brownsville, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, El Paso and Laredo. There are also two privately owned operations in Texas....
Peterson again backs mandatory national animal ID A mandatory national animal identification system is coming, at least if House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson has anything to say about it. In perhaps one of the underreported stories of the National Farmers Union (NFU) convention, House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, in a phone call to NFU members gathered Sunday night in Las Vegas, that Congress is likely to impose a mandatory animal ID program after this year’s elections. Peterson cited the recent bovine tuberculosis outbreak in Minnesota, and noted a similar recent outbreak in Michigan. Those examples, Peterson said, are why mandatory national animal ID is inevitable. “We are kidding ourselves if we don’t understand that we need to have a mandatory ID system,” declared Peterson. Resistance to national animal ID has been particularly strong in the cattle industry. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and R-CALF-USA, groups which disagree on many issues, are unified in their opposition to a mandatory system. But according to Peterson, those that resist implementation of mandatory animal ID will be compelled to participate. “Now, there’s going to have to be some people that are going to have to be forced to come along,” Peterson warned....
Judge Rules Poultry Are Not 'Livestock' A San Francisco judge has ruled that chickens are not "livestock," and, as a result, are not subject to the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, according to court filings. A lawsuit brought by the Humane Society of the United States against the Agriculture Department argued that USDA had misinterpreted the 50-year-old act. "The court finds the legislative history strongly demonstrates unambiguous congressional intent that livestock, as used in the HMSA, does not include poultry," U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote in her opinion. Judge Patel granted summary judgment in USDA's favor and dismissed the lawsuit. HSUS's argument was based on a 1958 dictionary definition of livestock that said that the word encompassed "useful" animals on a farm, while USDA said that the term livestock has always internally meant to exclude poultry. "The plain language of these bills indicates that Congress intended to exclude poultry from the definition of livestock when it enacted H.R. 8308, the bill that eventually became the HMSA," Patel wrote....
Can states cut carbon? EPA says no The political tussle over whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant subject to government regulation has gone on for years. Early in his first term as vice president, Al Gore pushed a tax on CO2. Democrats and Republicans in Congress were both skeptical. The idea went nowhere. As a presidential candidate, George Bush seemed to think regulating CO2 was a good idea. At least he said so. After his election, then-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Christie Whitman marched forth in support of what she thought was White House policy. She quickly got reeled back. Two years later she resigned, complaining that Vice President Dick Cheney kept pushing for weaker air pollution controls. Fast forward to the present, and the fight continues – this time pitting the Bush administration against a group of 19 governors led by Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) of California....
What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? The final morning of the conference began with a rousing speech by Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. He made it clear that to call him a global warming skeptic would be a bit of an understatement. A point Klaus makes crystal clear in his just published book, Blue Planet in Green Chains - What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? "My answer is clear and resolute: 'it is our freedom.' I may also add 'and our prosperity,'" declared Klaus. Klaus noted that ideological environmentalism appeals to the same sort of people who have always been attracted to collectivist ideas. He warned that environmentalism at its worst is just the latest dogma to claim that a looming "crisis" requires people to sacrifice their prosperity and their freedoms for the greater good. Let me quote Klaus at length. "Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical—the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality," warned Klaus. "What I have in mind [is], of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism." Klaus added, "What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project."....
Grand Canyon flushed with millions of litres of water More than one million litres per second of water were unleashed on the Grand Canyon Wednesday in a scientific experiment designed to rebuild beaches used by wildlife and visitors alike. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said the flood of water released into the canyon from the upstream Glen Canyon Dam was an attempt to recreate a natural process that has occurred for millions of years, and the sheer volume of water being released was at a rate more than twice that of similar actions in 1996 and 2004. "The water will be released at a rate that would fill the Empire State Building within 20 minutes," said Kempthorne, who was on hand to open the jet tubes at the Glen Canyon Dam that began the process. The water will flow for 60 hours through the 446-kilometre stretch of the Colorado river that makes up the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Scientists hope the stronger surge will give them an insight into how to rebuild eroded beaches downstream in the canyon by moving sediment that has built up over the years and creating new sandbars and beaches that will benefit endangered species living in the region.
Ranchers Say Grizzly Bill is Not Enough Idaho's ranchers may get some relief from all the grizzlies this year, lawmakers are very close to giving the final approval to legislation that would pay for the livestock they've lost because of grizzly activity. But some are saying that's not going to entirely fix the problem. "They're just expensive. What goes into the feed and the care and the years that it takes is a loss it is," Rancher Deanna Orme said. Deanna and Larry Orme breath a little easier when there's snow on the ground because their cattle are wrapped in the safety of winter, and the grizzlies are still hibernating. "That is situation one grizzly bear habitat and the bear are top priority. You can't harass them. You can't shoot them," Larry Orme said. This summer the Orme's photographed the grizzlies that frequented their grazing land near Ernest Lake, quite often the bears would feed on their skittish cows. Each one a thousand dollar meal. "If I count the calf and the yearlings, probably about five, and we had several that were hit with their claws and got infected and ultimately died," Larry added. "You try to bring them home and doctor them and they're so frightened and so injured and it's a loss they never recover for some reason," Deanna said....
Agency probes wolf-baiting claims Already stained by the blood of dead wolves and suffering from a variety of other setbacks, the program to reintroduce endangered Mexican gray wolves to the Southwest is now at the center of two criminal investigations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is formally looking into the disappearance of two wolves in New Mexico and a rancher’s claim that he intentionally baited wolves in order to get them killed. “We had requests that we do a criminal investigation, and we are,” says agency spokeswoman Elizabeth Slown. In an interview last year, New Mexico ranch hand Mike Miller told High Country News that he deliberately baited a wolf with cattle in order to trigger the federal “three strikes” rule, which mandates the shooting or capturing of any wolf that kills three cows in one year’s time. Miller works for the 275,000-acre Adobe-Slash Ranch, which is owned by Mexican businessman Eloy Vallina. Miller, who has an unlisted number, could not be reached for comment, and Gene Whetten, his supervisor, declined to answer questions when contacted by HCN on Feb. 26. “Mr. Miller works for me and he’s forbidden to talk to you,” Whetten says. He alleges that the paper “fabricated” most of its story, and that the ranch is considering legal action against HCN. The criminal investigations face significant challenges, according to a Fish and Wildlife source. In interviews with law enforcement officials, Miller reportedly denied making the statements attributed to him by HCN. Furthermore, according to the Interior Department, the fact that Miller branded cattle on private land within half a mile of a known wolf den does not in itself violate federal wolf reintroduction rules, which give ranchers wide leeway in how they operate even when wolves are nearby....
House Dems want firefighting fund The federal government would revamp how it pays for firefighting and take some of the burden off the U.S. Forest Service by creating a permanent fund for devastating blazes, under legislation introduced Thursday by key House Democrats. As wildfire seasons have grown increasingly expensive over the last decade, the cost of fighting fires has eaten an ever larger portion of the Forest Service budget -- now about 48 percent of it. That has left the agency with less money for other programs and priorities. The new fund would be used only for catastrophic, emergency wildland fire suppression. It would be separate from the money budgeted each year by Congress for anticipated and predicted fire suppression activities for the Forest Service and Interior Department; that allocation would continue. The amount of money in the new fund would be appropriated annually and based on the average amounts spent by the Forest Service and Interior to suppress catastrophic fires over the preceding five fiscal years. Last year, the Forest Service spent $741 million more than budgeted and Interior spent $249 million more than budgeted for emergency wildfire suppression, or a total of nearly $1 billion. The secretaries of the departments would be able to declare fires eligible for the fund by issuing a suppression emergency declaration that would evaluate the size, severity and threat of the fire....
Rey: States that back roadless forests should pay for fire costs California and other states that want to ban road-building in large swaths of national forests should have to pay for the resulting increased costs of fighting wildfires on those federal lands, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said Thursday. Rey, the undersecretary for natural resources and the environment in charge of the U.S. Forest Service, said the Bush administration has encouraged states and local governments to offer input in the management of federal lands. But he told a Wildland Urban Interface conference that one of the unintended consequences is that state-imposed moratoriums on development in roadless areas boost the cost of fighting fires because of reduced access to housing subdivisions that sprout up on the edge of those forests. "In a number of cases, most recently in the state of California, the states have weighed in with a profound desire not to see any roadless area incurred as a broad matter of environmental priorities. And I frankly don't have any quarrel with that as a statement of environmental policy," Rey said. "However, if we are going to keep those areas completely undeveloped and not even maintain the option for access for administrative and suppression purposes, we're going to increase the cost and complexity of suppression to protect those new subdivisions. That's a given with which their is almost no dispute," he said in a speech to the conference in Reno sponsored by the International Association of Fire Chiefs....
Over the River creators share dream Finally, a water project that doesn’t use water. Instead, it will employ cables, anchors, panels of fabric and a dash of imagination. Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude explained their Over the River project to an audience of about 275 Thursday at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center. They also talked about their 50-year collaboration that has brought them worldwide fame, and a happy marriage as well. If permitting goes as planned, the project would be open for viewing for about two weeks in the summer of 2012 in the Arkansas River canyon between Canon City and Salida. The project has created both excitement and controversy in the Upper Arkansas Valley. Most of those at Thursday’s presentation fell into the excited camp. The fabric panels that would cover about 6 miles of the 40-mile reach of river would present different views to those who view it from the shore and those who travel underneath. One of the reasons the Arkansas River was chosen for the project was because it is one of the most heavily rafted rivers in the West, Christo explained. “The Gates was a winter project, this will be a summer project,” Christo said, referring to the 2005 project in New York City’s Central Park that featured 16-foot-tall gates with hanging saffron panels....
The wood and the trees The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which owns 2.6m acres (1m hectares) of Oregon, now proposes to increase the tree harvest to four-and-a-half times last year's level. It wants to clear-cut large swathes of its forests, including some ancient ones. As it admits, this would mean less space for fluffy fauna. A second review concerns the spotted owl, which some claim is threatened less by logging than by a competitor, the barred owl. The prospect of a return to mass logging delights Robbie Robinson of Starfire Lumber. “Here we are in the timber capital of the world, and I have to go to Canada to get enough wood to employ 75 people,” he complains. It also pleases rural counties, which used to derive much of their income from timber sales and now depend on handouts from Washington, DC. These have become unreliable: Oregon's politicians are still fighting to get cash for the coming financial year. Yet even those who long for a return to clear-cutting doubt that it will happen soon. If the past is any guide, environmentalists will tie it up in court. Opinions are hardening against logging: last month Eugene's city council passed a resolution against it. Faye Stewart, a Lane county commissioner who lists “saw-milling” as one of his hobbies, says that the area has filled up with people who do not want their pretty new home denuded of greenery....
Judge rules Ariz. eagles to stay on endangered list A federal court Thursday granted Arizona's bald eagles at least nine more months on the Endangered Species List. Other U.S. bald eagles came off the list in July. In a decision handed down in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Judge Mary Marguia agreed with Arizona conservation groups that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act when it refused to act on the groups' 2004 petition to review the Arizona eagles' endangered status as a distinct population. Fewer than 50 breeding pairs exist in Arizona. "Our desert nesting bald eagle has been taken off death row. It's a great day," said Dr. Robin Silver of the Center for Biological Diversity, which, with Maricopa Audubon, had sued Fish and Wildlife....
Some bald eagles raising fine families in suburbia From a nearby perch, a bald eagle keeps her yellow eyes trained on her nest. Two 5-week-old chicks waddle and stretch their wings on a platform the size of a dinette table. This bald eagle had just fed her two chicks in their nest in a pine tree in the Patriots Plantation neighborhood off Fort Johnson Road. The chicks will grow to about the same size as their parents before taking their first flight About 300 feet away, another mother cares for her young. Amy Dickson looks after her 6-week-old son, Edmund, in her Patriots Plantation home. "We're doing the same thing," Dickson said. The discovery of the James Island eagles' nest came about eight years ago, when construction began on the subdivision on one side of the nest, and a soccer complex on the other. Now, in the northern reaches of West Ashley, another nest is turning suburban. Carolina Bay at Essex, a development off Glenn McConnell Parkway, boasts an eagle nest 660 feet into the thick pine trees surrounding the subdivision. About 20 nests statewide are in the same position, said S.C. Department of Natural Resources biologist Charlotte Hope....
Polar bears and melting ice Aware of the public's affinity toward the polar bear, environmentalist litigators have adopted the bear as their vehicle — their poster species — for achieving drastic regulatory prohibitions of the everyday human activities that, in their view, are causing irreversible environmental degradation. Pursuant to that agenda, in 2005 the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Greenpeace petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to add the polar bear to the Endangered Species Act list of threatened species. Their petition claims global warming is shrinking the bears' ice floe habitat, and without the ESA's protection, the bear will decline toward extinction within the next 45 years. On this basis, in 2007 FWS proposed listing the polar bear as a threatened species. What makes the polar bear's expected listing exceptionally news worthy is that it would be the first species given ESA protection because of global warming. Although global warming is still debatable as to cause and degree, tying it by regulatory fiat to the ESA creates a new paradigm. With the listing, unprecedented forces will be unleashed that economically could bring the country to its knees. Under the ESA, listing determinations are to be based on "the best scientific" data available." FWS interprets this to mean any data that will support the listing. Under this approach, FWS can disregard the fact that there are now 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears, up from a low of 5,000-10,000 in the 1950s and '60s, and higher than at any time in the 20th century....
Stricter study of Baca refuge drilling urged The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency joined with other state and federal agencies in calling for a tougher environmental review of a plan to drill exploratory oil and gas wells deep into the Baca National Wildlife Refuge. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's environmental analysis of the project didn't "provide sufficient information," wrote Larry Svoboda, director of the EPA's National Environmental Policy Act program in Denver. The agency, the National Park Service, the state Division of Wildlife and Saguache County, as well as thousands of private citizens, are requesting a more thorough study. Canada-based Lexam Exploration acquired the mineral rights to the property in 2000 before the federal government bought the Baca Ranch for $33 million to preserve the region's wide-open landscape and treasured wetlands....
State budgets $2.5 million for wolf management Wyoming will spend nearly $2.5 million on wolf management during the next two years, according to a bill Gov. Dave Freudenthal signed Wednesday. Wyoming is expected to take over management of wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Area in late March following the removal of the northern Rockies gray wolf from the endangered species list. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials announced the delisting Feb. 21. Part of the money will fund salaries for a wolf management coordinator and three biologists who will oversee monitoring, research and control efforts. The bill was part of a budget package that passed both chambers last week. Wyoming Game and Fish director Terry Cleveland said the money will go exclusively for management activities in the northwest corner of the state, where wolves will be considered trophy game and a hunting license will be required to shoot them. Outside northwest Wyoming, wolves will be considered predators and people will be able to kill them any time by any means and without a license....
California Wildlife Agency Ignores Global Warming Threat The California Fish and Game Commission will vote Friday whether to accept a scientific petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity to protect the American pika under the California Endangered Species Act from the impacts of global warming. The American pika is a small mammal related to the rabbit that lives in high-elevation mountain peaks throughout California and the west and cannot withstand warm temperatures. The petition is the first to seek California Endangered Species Act protection for a species threatened by global warming. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering a similar petition to list the American pika under the federal Endangered Species Act, as well as petitions to protect other species, such as the polar bear, from the effects of climate change. “Fish and Game’s attempt to bury its head in the sand is an embarrassment to California’s efforts as a national leader in the fight against climate change,” said Brian Nowicki of the Center for Biological Diversity....The polar bear under federal law, the pika under state law...are you beginning to see a pattern here?
Ex-Ducks Unlimited official cited for shooting swan A former Nevada official of the conservation group Ducks Unlimited was cited Monday for illegally shooting a swan in an Eastern Nevada game refuge, wildlife officials said. Alexander "Shay" Byars, formerly the regional director in Nevada and Arizona for Ducks Unlimited, was cited for four misdemeanor violations in connection with the Nov. 29 incident at Ruby Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, said Rob Buonamici, chief game warden for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. Bail for the violations is $2,552, and Byars also faces a $2,000 civil assessment. "From my perspective, this is a serious violation. It's not to be taken lightly," Buonamici said. Byars, 30, was cited after Nevada wildlife officials traced him to Florida, where he had moved from his former home in the Las Vegas area shortly after the incident, Buonamici said....
Lawmakers demand USDA list beef recall stores Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded the U.S. Agriculture Department release by next week a list of stores which received the 143 million lbs of beef recalled by a California company last month, but administration officials said that may not be possible. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Agency first proposed two years ago that retail establishments which received recalled products be identified publicly, to give consumers important information more quickly. USDA had planned to begin listing retailers later this year, but lawmakers and consumer groups are now pushing the department to do it sooner following the February 17 recall by Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co of 143 million lbs of meat, mostly beef. The meat from the recall, the largest in U.S. history, was delivered to just under 10,000 suppliers who later distributed the product to restaurants, retailers and other establishments, according to USDA. Most of the meat probably already has been consumed, and no illnesses have been reported....
Congress expected to subpoena meat company chief after massive beef recall House lawmakers are expected tomorrow to order the head of the company responsible for the largest beef recall in U.S. history to appear before Congress. The subpoena, if approved, comes a little more than week after the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. chief executive didn’t show up to testify at a congressional hearing on food safety. Several food company executives were invited. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight is scheduled to vote at 9:30 a.m. to subpoena Steve Mendell, the co-owner of the plant. Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell expects lawmakers to approve the action, which will legally require Mendell to testify March 12, according to a committee spokesman....
Some Canadian cows can't enter Mexico through Texas, ag boss says The Texas agriculture commissioner on Tuesday prohibited certain Canadian cattle from crossing into Mexico through state facilities after learning that the U.S. had not approved allowing trade of some animals. Reports first indicated the U.S. had signed off on an agreement between Canada and Mexico that permitted trading of specific dairy and beef cattle under 30 months old — including breeding stock. But Todd Staples, the state's ag commissioner, learned that U.S. Department of Agriculture officials had not approved the deal. Currently, Mexico only allows U.S. dairy heifers under the age of 24 months to be imported, despite in-depth international negotiations to broaden this to breeding stock. The trading agreement, Staples said in a statement, is not consistent with international standards set by the World Organisation of Animal Health. If the USDA permits the cattle to cross into this country from Mexico, they won't come through any of Texas' livestock export facilities along the border, according to the statement. The export sites are in Brownsville, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, El Paso and Laredo. There are also two privately owned operations in Texas....
Peterson again backs mandatory national animal ID A mandatory national animal identification system is coming, at least if House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson has anything to say about it. In perhaps one of the underreported stories of the National Farmers Union (NFU) convention, House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, in a phone call to NFU members gathered Sunday night in Las Vegas, that Congress is likely to impose a mandatory animal ID program after this year’s elections. Peterson cited the recent bovine tuberculosis outbreak in Minnesota, and noted a similar recent outbreak in Michigan. Those examples, Peterson said, are why mandatory national animal ID is inevitable. “We are kidding ourselves if we don’t understand that we need to have a mandatory ID system,” declared Peterson. Resistance to national animal ID has been particularly strong in the cattle industry. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and R-CALF-USA, groups which disagree on many issues, are unified in their opposition to a mandatory system. But according to Peterson, those that resist implementation of mandatory animal ID will be compelled to participate. “Now, there’s going to have to be some people that are going to have to be forced to come along,” Peterson warned....
Judge Rules Poultry Are Not 'Livestock' A San Francisco judge has ruled that chickens are not "livestock," and, as a result, are not subject to the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, according to court filings. A lawsuit brought by the Humane Society of the United States against the Agriculture Department argued that USDA had misinterpreted the 50-year-old act. "The court finds the legislative history strongly demonstrates unambiguous congressional intent that livestock, as used in the HMSA, does not include poultry," U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote in her opinion. Judge Patel granted summary judgment in USDA's favor and dismissed the lawsuit. HSUS's argument was based on a 1958 dictionary definition of livestock that said that the word encompassed "useful" animals on a farm, while USDA said that the term livestock has always internally meant to exclude poultry. "The plain language of these bills indicates that Congress intended to exclude poultry from the definition of livestock when it enacted H.R. 8308, the bill that eventually became the HMSA," Patel wrote....
FLE
FBI says warrantless wiretapping lasted until 2006 The FBI indicated Wednesday that widespread irregularities in a program to gather confidential data on people in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks continued into at least 2006. The bureau's use of national security letters to gather phone, Internet and credit records in terrorism and espionage investigations -- a power magnified by the Patriot Act -- first came under attack last March in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. In a study covering 2003 to 2005, Fine reported numerous instances of FBI personnel violating internal guidelines and procedures in how they obtained and used national security letters, which are a form of administrative subpoena. Testifying Wednesday on Capitol Hill, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that a second audit by the Justice Department's internal watchdog office, scheduled to be released soon, will show a continuation of problems into 2006. But Mueller said agency reforms he instituted are starting to work. National security letters are controversial because the FBI issues them without having to get court approval. The lack of protection led a federal judge in New York last year to strike down the practice, which he called "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering." The Justice Department is appealing that ruling....
DHS Strains As Goals, Mandates Go Unmet Stumping for President Bush's ill-fated immigration overhaul in 2006, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed that his department would wrest "operational control" of the nation's borders away from human and drug traffickers within five years. That projection was based on the prospect of tough new enforcement measures as well as a temporary-worker program meant to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, including the most ambitious use of surveillance technology ever tried on the U.S.-Mexico border. Two years later, the legislative overhaul has been shelved, development of the "virtual fence" has been delayed, and its designers are going back to the drawing board. Completion of its first phase has been put off until as late as 2011, congressional investigators say. The possibility of this outcome was flagged early on by internal and external watchdogs, who warned of unrealistically tight deadlines, vague direction to contractors, harsh operating conditions and tough requirements of Border Patrol end-users. Among a slew of high-profile projects that have gone astray, DHS has struggled to field next-generation explosive-detection "puffer devices" at airports and has projected it could take $22 billion and 16 more years to deploy advanced baggage-screening systems in airports. It scaled back and indefinitely delayed the "exit" half of a $10 billion, biometric entry-exit system to track foreign visitors using digital fingerprints and photographs, citing technological and cost problems. Homeland Security also faces a congressional mandate after the Dubai Ports World controversy to scan 100 percent of U.S.-bound shipping containers overseas, while scientific and logistical problems have hampered a $1.2 billion effort to field highly effective nuclear detection devices....
Brain Scanner Can Tell What You're Looking At Tell me what you see. On second thought, don't: A computer will soon be able to do it, simply by analyzing the activity of your brain. That's the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley. As the decoder is refined, it could be used to explore the phenomenon of visual attention -- concentration on one part of a complicated scene -- and then to illuminate the dimly understood intricacies of the mind's eyes. After that, the decoding model could be harnessed for more visionary purposes: early warning systems for neurological diseases or interfaces that allow paralyzed people to engage with the world. Other uses may not be so noble, such as marketing campaigns crafted for maximum mental penetration or invasions of mental privacy mounted in the name of fighting terrorism and crime. Eventually, Haynes said, the Berkeley model could be harnessed for something akin to mind reading....Just wait 'till the TSA gets ahold of this.
Border Fence Divides Government, Landowners Washington plans to build 670 miles of fencing along stretches of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border from California to Texas to help stem the tide of illegal immigration. More than 300 miles are already built, and the U.S. government is pushing hard to finish this year as mandated by Congress. But opposition by landowners could slow the project, about 54 percent of which is to be built on private property, a government watchdog agency said in a report in February. "Until the land issues are resolved, this factor will continue to pose a risk to meeting the deployments," the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said. Tamez is one of many opponents along the border who are fighting the fence. Ranchers fear they will lose access to irrigation pumps; ecologists worry it will block the migration of endangered species such as the jaguar and ocelot; anglers and boaters do not want to be cut off from the river. And in western states like Texas and Arizona, the government's concerns over illegal immigration clash with cherished values of landowner rights, which have helped sustain U.S. President George W. Bush's Republican Party in the region. "That was everybody's dream, we'll come out here ... develop the West and civilize it. Now the government is coming and saying 'Oh, we'll take that back, because we're going to build a wall. It's unAmerican,"' said rancher John Ladd of Naco, Arizona, whose land runs for 10 miles along the border with Mexico....
National Dragnet Is a Click Away Several thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information to fight crime and root out terror plots. As federal authorities struggled to meet information-sharing mandates after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, police agencies from Alaska and California to the Washington region poured millions of criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues. Those network efforts will begin expanding further this month, as some local and state agencies connect to a fledgling Justice Department system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a "one-stop shop" enabling federal law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous caches of local and state records for the first time. "It's going from the horse-and-buggy days to the space age, that's what it's like," said Sgt. Chuck Violette of the Tucson police department, one of almost 1,600 law enforcement agencies that uses a commercial data-mining system called Coplink....
Firearms database won’t work, study says Collecting ballistic "fingerprints" from millions of new firearms in the United States would create a database too unreliable to be useful in solving gun crimes, a team of scientists said Wednesday. In a 300-page report from the National Research Council, the scientists advised against a proposal that some lawmakers recommended in the aftermath of the 2002 sniper shootings in Washington and its outskirts. The concept relies on the assumption that individual guns leave unique markings, like fingerprints, on bullets and shell casings. Some in Congress have said that every new gun sold in the United States should be test-fired so those markings could be entered into a database. The thinking was that investigators could use the database to identify the firearm that fired bullets found at crime scenes. The study said the idea is not feasible because digital imaging technology is not sufficiently reliable to distinguish tiny differences in the markings....
Police, feds OK'd to check on mail U.S. postal authorities have approved more than 10,000 law enforcement requests to record names, addresses and other information from the outside of letters and packages of suspected criminals every year since 1998, according to U.S. Postal Inspection Service data. In each of those years, officials approved more than 97% of requests to record the information during criminal inquiries. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, the most recent year provided, officials granted at least 99.5% of requests, according to partial responses to inquiries filed by USA TODAY under the Freedom of Information Act. Postal officials have closely guarded the warrantless surveillance mail program, used for decades to track fugitives and to interrupt the delivery of illegal drugs or other controlled substances such as explosives. In other government surveillance, such as most wiretap programs, a judge approves requests. In this one, the USPIS' chief inspector has authority to grant or deny a request. The Postal Service handles 214 billion pieces of mail each year. Correspondence and packages transported by private carriers, such as FedEx and UPS, are not subject to the surveillance. Postal officials also would not discuss how much mail is being opened for content examinations, which do require a warrant authorized by a judge....
FBI boosts training in Islamic 'sensitivity' The FBI believes its agents still aren't sensitive enough to Muslims and their culture, so the bureau has extended by "a few weeks" its Islamic cultural "enrichment" training program, WND has learned. During a recent outreach event at a Washington-area mosque, FBI officials also reassured a large turnout of concerned Muslims that the bureau is not profiling Arabs and Muslims for terrorism, and has made investigating alleged "hate crimes" against them and other minorities "the second-highest priority in the criminal division of the FBI." Among the officials who attended the Feb. 8 "town hall meeting" at the large ADAMS Center mosque were Timothy Healy, deputy assistant director for FBI intelligence, and Dave Bennett, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Washington field office. The officials said terrorism is "not a new phenomenon" limited to Muslims, and they cited abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph as an example of a Christian terrorist. While they said they are concerned about the threat from "homegrown terror" perpetuated by second-generation Muslim immigrants, the officials assured the Muslim audience they are no more concerned about such homegrown attacks than they are "about bank robberies," and are not targeting the Muslim community for special surveillance....
Illegal-immigrant criminals siphon funds The next time a San Diego sheriff's deputy arrests a man who tries to steal a car, hauls him to a county detention center, starts asking questions and discovers he's in the country illegally, here's what will happen: The tax-supported district attorney's and public defender's offices will handle his case, a tax-supported judge will preside if it goes to trial, he'll spend an average three weeks in the local jail at $100 each day, a state prison could house him for years at $121 a day, and tax-funded probation officers will follow his progress. Only after that will he be deported. For years, the White House and border communities such as San Diego have argued over who should pay for all this. As a group of border states yesterday unveiled a report on the costs of incarcerating illegal immigrants linked to crimes, President Bush is again trying to eliminate all federal reimbursement for the task. One study released last summer found that illegal immigrants cost the San Diego County law enforcement system about $75 million a year. The county received just under $2.5 million in federal reimbursements in fiscal 2007....
UK - ID database will be 'universal' by 2017 All British citizens will be signed up to a national ID scheme within 10 years under plans outlined by the Government today. Millions of people in sensitive jobs, including teachers, carers and health workers will be among the first to be entered onto the identity register. Up to 100,000 airport staff will be issued with unique personal identity number starting later this year in a bid to kick-start the multi-billion pound project. Foreign nationals working in Britain will be issued with cards over the next two years. From 2010 young people will be able to get an identity card if they choose. Later that year the scheme will be opened to voluntary applicants of any age. From 2011 - after the next general election - anyone applying for a new passport will automatically be fingerprinted and their personal details logged on the database. In one change from original plans, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said it will be possible to decline the card itself and rely upon a passport as an identity document. Miss Smith said the aim of the timetable was to make coverage of the population "universal" by 2017....
Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003. "What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that." Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit. According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a "Rapid Deployment" team hired to revamp security on the carrier's internal network. He noticed that the carrier's officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" -- a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party. Quantico, Virginia, is home to a Marine base. But perhaps more relevantly, it's also the center of the FBI's electronic surveillance operations....
FBI says warrantless wiretapping lasted until 2006 The FBI indicated Wednesday that widespread irregularities in a program to gather confidential data on people in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks continued into at least 2006. The bureau's use of national security letters to gather phone, Internet and credit records in terrorism and espionage investigations -- a power magnified by the Patriot Act -- first came under attack last March in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. In a study covering 2003 to 2005, Fine reported numerous instances of FBI personnel violating internal guidelines and procedures in how they obtained and used national security letters, which are a form of administrative subpoena. Testifying Wednesday on Capitol Hill, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that a second audit by the Justice Department's internal watchdog office, scheduled to be released soon, will show a continuation of problems into 2006. But Mueller said agency reforms he instituted are starting to work. National security letters are controversial because the FBI issues them without having to get court approval. The lack of protection led a federal judge in New York last year to strike down the practice, which he called "the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering." The Justice Department is appealing that ruling....
DHS Strains As Goals, Mandates Go Unmet Stumping for President Bush's ill-fated immigration overhaul in 2006, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed that his department would wrest "operational control" of the nation's borders away from human and drug traffickers within five years. That projection was based on the prospect of tough new enforcement measures as well as a temporary-worker program meant to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, including the most ambitious use of surveillance technology ever tried on the U.S.-Mexico border. Two years later, the legislative overhaul has been shelved, development of the "virtual fence" has been delayed, and its designers are going back to the drawing board. Completion of its first phase has been put off until as late as 2011, congressional investigators say. The possibility of this outcome was flagged early on by internal and external watchdogs, who warned of unrealistically tight deadlines, vague direction to contractors, harsh operating conditions and tough requirements of Border Patrol end-users. Among a slew of high-profile projects that have gone astray, DHS has struggled to field next-generation explosive-detection "puffer devices" at airports and has projected it could take $22 billion and 16 more years to deploy advanced baggage-screening systems in airports. It scaled back and indefinitely delayed the "exit" half of a $10 billion, biometric entry-exit system to track foreign visitors using digital fingerprints and photographs, citing technological and cost problems. Homeland Security also faces a congressional mandate after the Dubai Ports World controversy to scan 100 percent of U.S.-bound shipping containers overseas, while scientific and logistical problems have hampered a $1.2 billion effort to field highly effective nuclear detection devices....
Brain Scanner Can Tell What You're Looking At Tell me what you see. On second thought, don't: A computer will soon be able to do it, simply by analyzing the activity of your brain. That's the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley. As the decoder is refined, it could be used to explore the phenomenon of visual attention -- concentration on one part of a complicated scene -- and then to illuminate the dimly understood intricacies of the mind's eyes. After that, the decoding model could be harnessed for more visionary purposes: early warning systems for neurological diseases or interfaces that allow paralyzed people to engage with the world. Other uses may not be so noble, such as marketing campaigns crafted for maximum mental penetration or invasions of mental privacy mounted in the name of fighting terrorism and crime. Eventually, Haynes said, the Berkeley model could be harnessed for something akin to mind reading....Just wait 'till the TSA gets ahold of this.
Border Fence Divides Government, Landowners Washington plans to build 670 miles of fencing along stretches of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border from California to Texas to help stem the tide of illegal immigration. More than 300 miles are already built, and the U.S. government is pushing hard to finish this year as mandated by Congress. But opposition by landowners could slow the project, about 54 percent of which is to be built on private property, a government watchdog agency said in a report in February. "Until the land issues are resolved, this factor will continue to pose a risk to meeting the deployments," the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said. Tamez is one of many opponents along the border who are fighting the fence. Ranchers fear they will lose access to irrigation pumps; ecologists worry it will block the migration of endangered species such as the jaguar and ocelot; anglers and boaters do not want to be cut off from the river. And in western states like Texas and Arizona, the government's concerns over illegal immigration clash with cherished values of landowner rights, which have helped sustain U.S. President George W. Bush's Republican Party in the region. "That was everybody's dream, we'll come out here ... develop the West and civilize it. Now the government is coming and saying 'Oh, we'll take that back, because we're going to build a wall. It's unAmerican,"' said rancher John Ladd of Naco, Arizona, whose land runs for 10 miles along the border with Mexico....
National Dragnet Is a Click Away Several thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information to fight crime and root out terror plots. As federal authorities struggled to meet information-sharing mandates after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, police agencies from Alaska and California to the Washington region poured millions of criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues. Those network efforts will begin expanding further this month, as some local and state agencies connect to a fledgling Justice Department system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a "one-stop shop" enabling federal law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous caches of local and state records for the first time. "It's going from the horse-and-buggy days to the space age, that's what it's like," said Sgt. Chuck Violette of the Tucson police department, one of almost 1,600 law enforcement agencies that uses a commercial data-mining system called Coplink....
Firearms database won’t work, study says Collecting ballistic "fingerprints" from millions of new firearms in the United States would create a database too unreliable to be useful in solving gun crimes, a team of scientists said Wednesday. In a 300-page report from the National Research Council, the scientists advised against a proposal that some lawmakers recommended in the aftermath of the 2002 sniper shootings in Washington and its outskirts. The concept relies on the assumption that individual guns leave unique markings, like fingerprints, on bullets and shell casings. Some in Congress have said that every new gun sold in the United States should be test-fired so those markings could be entered into a database. The thinking was that investigators could use the database to identify the firearm that fired bullets found at crime scenes. The study said the idea is not feasible because digital imaging technology is not sufficiently reliable to distinguish tiny differences in the markings....
Police, feds OK'd to check on mail U.S. postal authorities have approved more than 10,000 law enforcement requests to record names, addresses and other information from the outside of letters and packages of suspected criminals every year since 1998, according to U.S. Postal Inspection Service data. In each of those years, officials approved more than 97% of requests to record the information during criminal inquiries. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, the most recent year provided, officials granted at least 99.5% of requests, according to partial responses to inquiries filed by USA TODAY under the Freedom of Information Act. Postal officials have closely guarded the warrantless surveillance mail program, used for decades to track fugitives and to interrupt the delivery of illegal drugs or other controlled substances such as explosives. In other government surveillance, such as most wiretap programs, a judge approves requests. In this one, the USPIS' chief inspector has authority to grant or deny a request. The Postal Service handles 214 billion pieces of mail each year. Correspondence and packages transported by private carriers, such as FedEx and UPS, are not subject to the surveillance. Postal officials also would not discuss how much mail is being opened for content examinations, which do require a warrant authorized by a judge....
FBI boosts training in Islamic 'sensitivity' The FBI believes its agents still aren't sensitive enough to Muslims and their culture, so the bureau has extended by "a few weeks" its Islamic cultural "enrichment" training program, WND has learned. During a recent outreach event at a Washington-area mosque, FBI officials also reassured a large turnout of concerned Muslims that the bureau is not profiling Arabs and Muslims for terrorism, and has made investigating alleged "hate crimes" against them and other minorities "the second-highest priority in the criminal division of the FBI." Among the officials who attended the Feb. 8 "town hall meeting" at the large ADAMS Center mosque were Timothy Healy, deputy assistant director for FBI intelligence, and Dave Bennett, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Washington field office. The officials said terrorism is "not a new phenomenon" limited to Muslims, and they cited abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph as an example of a Christian terrorist. While they said they are concerned about the threat from "homegrown terror" perpetuated by second-generation Muslim immigrants, the officials assured the Muslim audience they are no more concerned about such homegrown attacks than they are "about bank robberies," and are not targeting the Muslim community for special surveillance....
Illegal-immigrant criminals siphon funds The next time a San Diego sheriff's deputy arrests a man who tries to steal a car, hauls him to a county detention center, starts asking questions and discovers he's in the country illegally, here's what will happen: The tax-supported district attorney's and public defender's offices will handle his case, a tax-supported judge will preside if it goes to trial, he'll spend an average three weeks in the local jail at $100 each day, a state prison could house him for years at $121 a day, and tax-funded probation officers will follow his progress. Only after that will he be deported. For years, the White House and border communities such as San Diego have argued over who should pay for all this. As a group of border states yesterday unveiled a report on the costs of incarcerating illegal immigrants linked to crimes, President Bush is again trying to eliminate all federal reimbursement for the task. One study released last summer found that illegal immigrants cost the San Diego County law enforcement system about $75 million a year. The county received just under $2.5 million in federal reimbursements in fiscal 2007....
UK - ID database will be 'universal' by 2017 All British citizens will be signed up to a national ID scheme within 10 years under plans outlined by the Government today. Millions of people in sensitive jobs, including teachers, carers and health workers will be among the first to be entered onto the identity register. Up to 100,000 airport staff will be issued with unique personal identity number starting later this year in a bid to kick-start the multi-billion pound project. Foreign nationals working in Britain will be issued with cards over the next two years. From 2010 young people will be able to get an identity card if they choose. Later that year the scheme will be opened to voluntary applicants of any age. From 2011 - after the next general election - anyone applying for a new passport will automatically be fingerprinted and their personal details logged on the database. In one change from original plans, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said it will be possible to decline the card itself and rely upon a passport as an identity document. Miss Smith said the aim of the timetable was to make coverage of the population "universal" by 2017....
Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003. "What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that." Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit. According to his affidavit, Pasdar tumbled to the surveillance superhighway in September 2003, when he led a "Rapid Deployment" team hired to revamp security on the carrier's internal network. He noticed that the carrier's officials got squirrelly when he asked about a mysterious "Quantico Circuit" -- a 45 megabit/second DS-3 line linking its most sensitive network to an unnamed third party. Quantico, Virginia, is home to a Marine base. But perhaps more relevantly, it's also the center of the FBI's electronic surveillance operations....
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Grand Canyon much older than previously thought The Grand Canyon, carved out over the eons by rushing river water, began to form 17 million years ago, making it nearly three times older than previously thought, scientists said on Thursday. The general consensus among geologists had been that the famed natural landmark in Arizona was about 6 million years old. But now University of New Mexico scientists say it is far older based on their findings using a technique called uranium-lead isotope to date mineral deposits in caves from nine sites in the canyon's walls. The cave formations provided a record of a dropping water table as the canyon deepened. The gorge is 277 miles long, 1.1 miles deep at its deepest point and up to 18 miles wide. The Colorado River that runs through it arises in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and flows southwest about 1,400 miles to the Gulf of California. The scientists found that there is a kind of dual history to the canyon, with the western portion starting to form about 17 million years ago when water from a predecessor to the Colorado River began the slow, inexorable process of eroding the rock, they said. The eastern portion began forming closer to the 6 million-year-old date that had been the estimate for the whole canyon, they said....
Owners, vet think coyotes killed dog in back yard When Candelario and Jessica Gabaldon adopted Sophie, a small and friendly corgi, three years ago from a Florida rescue shelter, they saved her life. But last week, the couple couldn't save her from what they and their veterinarian believe was a pack of coyotes. The Gabaldons, who live on Amistad Drive just off Sichler Road, had just returned home from dinner last Wednesday evening when they realized that 8-year-old Sophie, who was in their backyard with her playmate, a young boxer, had been brutally attacked. "She was in mad pain," Candelario said. "Her right front leg was almost ripped right off. You could see muscles and tendons and bone." "The best way I could describe it was someone ripping off the drumstick of a turkey on Thanksgiving," Jessica said. "We just couldn't believe it." Van Otten said that, as he began to shave the dog for surgery, he found many more puncture wounds and actual tears on the animal's neck and back. He found that the dog's other leg had also sustained considerable damage. The ligaments holding the animal's elbow together were displaced and a bone was broken.Van Otten said, from what he observed of Sophie's wounds, it looked as if she was pulled apart from each limb. He said he felt that her injuries were beyond his capabilities to repair and he suggested that the Gabaldons put their beloved corgi to sleep. They agreed. "Based on the teeth marks I saw, I do suspect coyotes, but I can't be 100 percent certain," Van Otten said. "I've never seen an arm torn off like that. These corgis don't back down; they're tenacious little dogs." Van Otten, whose office is down the road from where the Gabaldons live, said he has seen coyotes in the area as recently as a month ago....
We must howl to Congress to keep the green fire glowing Perched on a mountainside in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley with Park Ranger Rick McIntyre, we eyed the Crystal Creek wolf pack tracking an elk. It was 1995, and these were the first wolves to return to the national park in 60 years. As we watched the alpha male and female loping together across the green thaw of spring grasses, we could not know how these wolves would revitalize this ecosystem, dramatically increasing everything from insects to trees to songbird populations. And yet, with all of these environmental successes, the Bush administration has announced plans to end federal protection for wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. As soon as this month, federal wildlife managers will use our taxpayer dollars to trap, hunt and shoot wolves from airplanes, even kill wolf pups in their dens. This is a wildly unpopular extermination program driven by a small minority of ranchers and hunters who see the wild wolf only as a rival, when, in fact, wolves have much to teach us about ecosystem balance....
Army hints at seller for Pinon expansion Like a grass fire, word spread quickly this week that the Army claims to have a willing seller to provide as much as 100,000 acres for the expansion of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site. The only problem is that the largest landowner in the area, Craig Walker of Denver, repeated his refusal Wednesday to sell land to the Army and said he has never spoken to anyone from the Army about his two ranches in the area. "I want to stop this talk as quickly as possible," Walker, who owns approximately 100,000 acres in two different parcels, said. "I'm not interested in selling to the Army. I'm trying to put my land into conservation easements as quickly as possible. I am opposed to the expansion of Pinon Canyon." The discussion of a willing seller broke out Tuesday after Jim Montoya, Las Animas County commissioner, told area ranchers that the Army claims it has been approached by a willing seller who can offer as much as 100,000 acres for the planned expansion of Pinon Canyon. Montoya and the other county commissioners met with Army officials at the Pentagon last week as part of a trip to shore up congressional opposition to the proposed 414,000-acre expansion of the training area northeast of Trinidad....
The Accidental Green Developer Even as he proudly shows off the sustainable features of the Saddlehorn development, Doug Averill shies away from the terms “developer” and “green.” He didn’t intend to be either, he insists. What he and his partners planned just happened to fit the bill. Averill argues that Montanans have always been great environmentalists, acting as good stewards in order to preserve their way of life: “If we weren’t good land stewards, we’d be out of timber, overrun with weeds, with no wildlife or beauty left.” Saddlehorn wasn’t about being green, Averill says, it was about doing what made sense to him as a rancher and what fits with the community. Yet the hardest sell for Saddlehorn, and projects like it, may still be to other Montanans. The state historically hasn’t been warm to the idea of green building, or really any part of the environmental movement. In the Flathead, tensions between businesses and environmentalists are often heated, even drawing national attention when at their most contentious. “I think Montanans have always resented the idea of someone from the outside or an urban area telling us how to be green,” Averill said. “The result is that it’s been somewhat stiff-armed. There’s still this image of a gal sitting up in a tree with hairy legs telling us how to act.”....
EDITORIAL: 'Alarmist and extreme' Some left-wingers and greens don't like the state's new chief of Agriculture. Tony Lesperance, a rancher and former Elko County commissioner, took over the agency Monday at the request of Gov. Jim Gibbons. The 72-year-old Mr. Lesperance, who turned down an earlier offer for the post, said he'll be on the job for about 18 months to see the agency through the state's current budget crunch and the next legislative session. But Launce Rake, a spokesman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, questioned the interim appointment, calling Mr. Lesperance's views "alarmist and extreme." What is it that has Mr. Rake and his "progressive" friends in such a lather? Mr. Lesperance has been a vocal critic of the federal government's land-use policies in Nevada, where it controls 90 percent of the real estate. He played a pivotal role in the controversy that erupted in the late 1990s after the Forest Service -- operating at the behest of hard-core environmental groups -- refused to allow Elko County to rebuild a washed out road near Jarbidge that had been used for decades to access campgrounds and a wilderness area. The standoff became heated and resentment toward heavy-handed federal regulation was palpable in many parts of rural Nevada. But Mr. Lesperance and the "Shovel Brigade" eventually prevailed; the road was repaired and reopened....
Forest Service ponders 'let-burn' policy The U.S. Forest Service is considering allowing some naturally caused wildfires to burn in remote areas of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. The goal is to improve forest health while reducing the potential for catastrophic fires in the long term, forest supervisor Scott Conroy said in a prepared statement. Experts say large fires in the West in recent summers are in part the result of forests overgrown from decades of fire suppression. The proposed change comes as the agency is updating forest management plans created in the 1990s. "Land managers throughout the West have learned over the last 40 years that there are ecological benefits of having fire on the landscape as it can provide for a renewal of the forest," Conroy said. "It is a natural cycle of life in a forest."....
Bill modifies boundaries between public, private land The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved a bill introduced by Sen. Larry Craig, titled the "Idaho Wilderness Boundary Modification Act" on Jan. 30. The bill is a compromise between private and public land officials to alter the boundaries of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area to allow for continued use of the land by the private domain Diamond D Ranch. There will be no net wilderness loss and the ranch will use land it has been using since before the area was protected as wilderness, without the restrictions of operating on wilderness land. The restrictions keep developers from impacting wilderness areas in any way. The boundaries are only being altered, so neither side is losing any land. "The act supports the use of water, roads and fences that pre-date the wilderness area," Will Hart, spokesman for Sen. Craig, said. "The Forest Service has worked with local and congressional delegations to mediate this effort, which is merely a use of development that was there before the wilderness was designated."....
Group acquires oil, gas leases Another company has transferred federal energy leases to a conservation group, further reducing the possibility of natural-gas development on public lands along Montana's wildlife-rich Rocky Mountain Front. Trout Unlimited said this week that it received leases the Kohlman Co. held for potential gas work on the Front, the rugged expanse where the mountains meet the plains for about 100 miles south of Glacier National Park. Trout Unlimited, which has joined other groups in declaring the Front too environmentally sensitive for oil or gas drilling, said it intends to return those leases to the federal government. "The public lands of the Front are some of the wildest country in the lower 48 states," Gene Sentz of the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front said Tuesday. "We've been working more than 30 years now to try to keep them undeveloped." The lease transfer is atop earlier deals that moved Front leases into the hands of conservationists, who then transferred them to the federal government. With the latest agreement, four companies have sold or donated leases on some 63,000 acres of the Front during the last two years. Conservationists would like an end to energy leases on about twice that much land, said the coalition's Chris Mehl....
Camera spots wolverine in Sierra Nevada A research project aimed at weasels has turned up a bigger prize: a picture of a wolverine, an elusive animal scientists feared may have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada long ago by human activity. The discovery could affect land-use decisions if the wolverine is declared an endangered species, a step the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering, although the animals typically live at high elevations where there is limited development. A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range. News of the picture surprised scientists, who thought wolverines, if they still inhabited the Sierra, would be found only in the southern part of the range, not in the Lake Tahoe area. There had been sightings of wolverines by reputable people but no solid proof they were still in the Sierra, said Bill Zielinski, a research ecologist for the Forest Service who was working with Moriatry....
Mountain biking outreach efforts grow with popularity The rush of speeding down a rocky trail and the ultimate satisfaction of taking out a grueling climb, switchback after switchback, keep bikers riding the mountain trails around Fort Collins. For more and more local mountain bikers, the thrilling rides to be found all around Fort Collins have inspired them to give something back to the trails they love. They do it by donning the distinctive yellow jerseys of the Diamond Peaks Mountain Bike Patrol, an organization that has been educating mountain bikers on Front Range trails for 10 years. The growth and popularity of these patrols in recent years is hard to ignore. Diamond Peaks logged 521 patrols totaling 2,539 hours (106 full days) in 2007, double the patrols and triple the number of hours in the 2006 season....
Too little done to protect endangered species, lawsuit says Environmental groups on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against three federal agencies, alleging they have failed to protect dozens of endangered species that live in Southern California's four national forests from harmful impacts of off-roading, livestock grazing, roads and power lines. The legal action comes on the heels of a lawsuit California officials filed Feb. 28 against the U.S. Forest Service because the management plans for the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Angeles and Los Padres national forests permit road construction and oil drilling that have been long opposed by the state. The most recent lawsuit specifically targets so-called biological opinions issued in 2005 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service that assessed impacts on endangered species from those same forest management plans. The third target of Wednesday's lawsuit is the U.S. Forest Service. The environmental groups allege those opinions failed to consider ways to prevent harm to species by activities on forest lands, and failed to require any method for tracking how many plants and animals are killed because of those activities....
Off-road vehicle surge straining land agencies The Hayeses are part of a growing trend across the nation and Arizona. Off-road vehicle use has exploded in the past 10 years, straining land-management agencies and risking some of our most sensitive natural resources. State and federal officials are scrambling to deal with the roaring horde of ATV users. All national forests are assessing motorized use of trails, and a Glendale state representative has introduced a bill that would require ATV registration and a user fee to fund education and enforcement. His goal is to preserve access and the land. Rep. Jerry Weiers thinks his bill will pass this year. It passed in the House on Thursday and now goes to the Senate, where in 2007 it failed by one vote when several supporters were absent. Weiers' bill, which would take effect Jan. 1, is not aimed at restricting ATV users, said Jeff Gursh, an avid dirt biker who volunteers with the Arizona Off-Highway Vehicle Coalition. "All it does is give the land management agencies a tool for managing the land," he said. Weiers' bill would create an annual registration fee - estimated at $23 - for off-road vehicles and create a fund for ATV law enforcement, education and trail maintenance and construction. The registration fee would raise about $8 million per year, of which 70 percent would go to the new Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Fund and 30 percent to the existing Highway User Revenue Fund. Arizona State Parks would get 60 percent of the Recreation Fund, the state Game & Fish Department would get 35 percent and the State Land Department would get 5 percent....
Reserve-area residents fined for illegal outfitting, guiding A federal judge has fined three brothers—two outfitters and a guide—more than $7,000 after they were accused of violating regulations while outfitting or guiding hunters in the Gila National Forest. Michael DeLaO, Jamie DeLaO, and Carlos DeLaO, all from the Reserve area, were cited last year for not complying with federal and state special use permit requirements for commercial operations. U.S. Magistrate William P. Lynch recently sentenced the brothers on charges filed after an investigation by the state Department of Game and Fish and the Gila National Forest. Michael DeLaO, 29, pleaded guilty to noncompliance with U.S. Forest Service special use permits and use of an unauthorized guide and was fined $3,880. Jamie DeLaO, 34, pleaded guilty to the same charges and was fined $3,030. Carlos DeLaO, 36, pleaded guilty to operating a commercial business on Forest Service lands without a special use permit and unauthorized guiding on the forest, and was fined $325....
Mining proposal called wildlife threat Environmental groups have fired off a new round of court challenges to the proposed Rock Creek Mine, arguing that extracting silver and copper from beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness Area would result in the deaths of protected grizzly bears and bull trout. The lawsuits accuse federal agencies of violating the Endangered Species Act by approving the mine. "Grizzly and bull-trout populations are suffering. It's going to be hard for them to survive the industrialization of their habitat," said Jim Costello, Montana field organizer for the Rock Creek Alliance. The alliance is one of 10 groups involved in two separate lawsuits against the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The paperwork was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Missoula. Fifteen or fewer grizzlies are still believed to roam the Cabinet Mountains, a rugged range on the Idaho-Montana border. How the mine would affect grizzly bears, threatened bull trout and water quality in the Clark Fork River has been the subject of numerous lawsuits since the mine was first proposed in the 1980s. The Clark Fork River flows into Idaho's Lake Pend Oreille shortly after crossing the state line....
Marbled murrelet will keep territory Federal wildlife officials have dropped controversial plans to sharply reduce the area of critical habitat reserved for the marbled murrelet, a seabird known for standing in the way of Northwest logging. The decision reverses earlier efforts, supported by the timber industry, to scale back protections for the bird, which is classified as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. It could also complicate a proposal by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to accelerate logging in Oregon's Coast Range. The agency wants to produce more timber revenue in financially strapped coastal counties. In 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed canceling about 95 percent of the designated critical habitat for the marbled murrelet, saying the area was already protected. But environmental groups complained that the move would pave the way for more intensive logging. Critical habitat comes into play mainly on federal land. Public land agencies must consult with wildlife biologists before proposing timber sales and other projects in critical habitat. The Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday that it would be inappropriate to reduce the habitat for the bird while the BLM is considering changes in managing the coastal lands....
Thousands of acres near Gunnison Gorge off limits to humans Thousands of acres near the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area will be off limits to humans to protect wildlife, including the threatened sage grouse, and prevent soil erosion. The 17,570 acres on parts of the Black Ridge and Fruitland mesas, west of the Gunnison Gorge Wilderness, will be closed to hiking, horseback, skiing, and motorized activity through April 30. Bureau of Land Management officials, who manage the land, fear snow and poor conditions on other nearby public lands could drive people to the area being closed....
Brazilian meat packers jump to top spot in U.S. A Brazilian firm is buying two of the top five beef processing companies in the United States, making it the nation's largest meat processor and drawing fire from a national cattle group over further concentration in the meatpacking industry. Smithfield Foods said Wednesday it is selling its beef operations for $565 million to Brazil's JBS SA, the second deal in two days for the Brazilian company. Smithfield Foods is the fifth-largest U.S. beef producer. On Tuesday, National Beef Packing Co., the nation's fourth-largest beef processor, said it is being acquired by JBS for cash and stock in a deal worth $560 million. The acquisitions will vault JBS past Cargill Meat Solutions for the top spot in U.S. meat processing companies. Randy Stevenson of Wheatland, Wyo., an official with R-CALF USA, said the moves, if approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, show the importance of getting competition reforms included in the new farm bill....
Festival celebrates Wallace Stegner's West Point Reyes Station, that oddly blended enclave of businesses, farms and artists in rural West Marin, is about to be invaded by hundreds of fans of the modern American West's foremost man of letters: Wallace Stegner. A three-day conference beginning Friday is being staged to salute both the never-ending battle to save Western wildlands and Stegner, who championed that cause up to the day he died in 1993 at age 84. It will be one of the greatest gatherings of Western literature writers willing to chew grass blades with anyone who cares to chat. For the uninitiated, "Western" writing has little to do these days with cowboy and Indian adventures. It instead means prose, poetry and research about the region from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast that has for more than a century defined the American essence of frontier mentality, individual ruggedness and wilderness. Authors such as John Steinbeck and Edward Abbey have earned renown here, but it's never been an easy publishing road. As Stegner himself discovered - even through penning the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Angle of Repose" and 27 other books - the West and its writers are often ignored by what many regard an Eastern-based literary snobbishness....
Army hints at seller for Pinon expansion Like a grass fire, word spread quickly this week that the Army claims to have a willing seller to provide as much as 100,000 acres for the expansion of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site. The only problem is that the largest landowner in the area, Craig Walker of Denver, repeated his refusal Wednesday to sell land to the Army and said he has never spoken to anyone from the Army about his two ranches in the area. "I want to stop this talk as quickly as possible," Walker, who owns approximately 100,000 acres in two different parcels, said. "I'm not interested in selling to the Army. I'm trying to put my land into conservation easements as quickly as possible. I am opposed to the expansion of Pinon Canyon." The discussion of a willing seller broke out Tuesday after Jim Montoya, Las Animas County commissioner, told area ranchers that the Army claims it has been approached by a willing seller who can offer as much as 100,000 acres for the planned expansion of Pinon Canyon. Montoya and the other county commissioners met with Army officials at the Pentagon last week as part of a trip to shore up congressional opposition to the proposed 414,000-acre expansion of the training area northeast of Trinidad....
The Accidental Green Developer Even as he proudly shows off the sustainable features of the Saddlehorn development, Doug Averill shies away from the terms “developer” and “green.” He didn’t intend to be either, he insists. What he and his partners planned just happened to fit the bill. Averill argues that Montanans have always been great environmentalists, acting as good stewards in order to preserve their way of life: “If we weren’t good land stewards, we’d be out of timber, overrun with weeds, with no wildlife or beauty left.” Saddlehorn wasn’t about being green, Averill says, it was about doing what made sense to him as a rancher and what fits with the community. Yet the hardest sell for Saddlehorn, and projects like it, may still be to other Montanans. The state historically hasn’t been warm to the idea of green building, or really any part of the environmental movement. In the Flathead, tensions between businesses and environmentalists are often heated, even drawing national attention when at their most contentious. “I think Montanans have always resented the idea of someone from the outside or an urban area telling us how to be green,” Averill said. “The result is that it’s been somewhat stiff-armed. There’s still this image of a gal sitting up in a tree with hairy legs telling us how to act.”....
EDITORIAL: 'Alarmist and extreme' Some left-wingers and greens don't like the state's new chief of Agriculture. Tony Lesperance, a rancher and former Elko County commissioner, took over the agency Monday at the request of Gov. Jim Gibbons. The 72-year-old Mr. Lesperance, who turned down an earlier offer for the post, said he'll be on the job for about 18 months to see the agency through the state's current budget crunch and the next legislative session. But Launce Rake, a spokesman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, questioned the interim appointment, calling Mr. Lesperance's views "alarmist and extreme." What is it that has Mr. Rake and his "progressive" friends in such a lather? Mr. Lesperance has been a vocal critic of the federal government's land-use policies in Nevada, where it controls 90 percent of the real estate. He played a pivotal role in the controversy that erupted in the late 1990s after the Forest Service -- operating at the behest of hard-core environmental groups -- refused to allow Elko County to rebuild a washed out road near Jarbidge that had been used for decades to access campgrounds and a wilderness area. The standoff became heated and resentment toward heavy-handed federal regulation was palpable in many parts of rural Nevada. But Mr. Lesperance and the "Shovel Brigade" eventually prevailed; the road was repaired and reopened....
Forest Service ponders 'let-burn' policy The U.S. Forest Service is considering allowing some naturally caused wildfires to burn in remote areas of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. The goal is to improve forest health while reducing the potential for catastrophic fires in the long term, forest supervisor Scott Conroy said in a prepared statement. Experts say large fires in the West in recent summers are in part the result of forests overgrown from decades of fire suppression. The proposed change comes as the agency is updating forest management plans created in the 1990s. "Land managers throughout the West have learned over the last 40 years that there are ecological benefits of having fire on the landscape as it can provide for a renewal of the forest," Conroy said. "It is a natural cycle of life in a forest."....
Bill modifies boundaries between public, private land The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved a bill introduced by Sen. Larry Craig, titled the "Idaho Wilderness Boundary Modification Act" on Jan. 30. The bill is a compromise between private and public land officials to alter the boundaries of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area to allow for continued use of the land by the private domain Diamond D Ranch. There will be no net wilderness loss and the ranch will use land it has been using since before the area was protected as wilderness, without the restrictions of operating on wilderness land. The restrictions keep developers from impacting wilderness areas in any way. The boundaries are only being altered, so neither side is losing any land. "The act supports the use of water, roads and fences that pre-date the wilderness area," Will Hart, spokesman for Sen. Craig, said. "The Forest Service has worked with local and congressional delegations to mediate this effort, which is merely a use of development that was there before the wilderness was designated."....
Group acquires oil, gas leases Another company has transferred federal energy leases to a conservation group, further reducing the possibility of natural-gas development on public lands along Montana's wildlife-rich Rocky Mountain Front. Trout Unlimited said this week that it received leases the Kohlman Co. held for potential gas work on the Front, the rugged expanse where the mountains meet the plains for about 100 miles south of Glacier National Park. Trout Unlimited, which has joined other groups in declaring the Front too environmentally sensitive for oil or gas drilling, said it intends to return those leases to the federal government. "The public lands of the Front are some of the wildest country in the lower 48 states," Gene Sentz of the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front said Tuesday. "We've been working more than 30 years now to try to keep them undeveloped." The lease transfer is atop earlier deals that moved Front leases into the hands of conservationists, who then transferred them to the federal government. With the latest agreement, four companies have sold or donated leases on some 63,000 acres of the Front during the last two years. Conservationists would like an end to energy leases on about twice that much land, said the coalition's Chris Mehl....
Camera spots wolverine in Sierra Nevada A research project aimed at weasels has turned up a bigger prize: a picture of a wolverine, an elusive animal scientists feared may have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada long ago by human activity. The discovery could affect land-use decisions if the wolverine is declared an endangered species, a step the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering, although the animals typically live at high elevations where there is limited development. A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range. News of the picture surprised scientists, who thought wolverines, if they still inhabited the Sierra, would be found only in the southern part of the range, not in the Lake Tahoe area. There had been sightings of wolverines by reputable people but no solid proof they were still in the Sierra, said Bill Zielinski, a research ecologist for the Forest Service who was working with Moriatry....
Mountain biking outreach efforts grow with popularity The rush of speeding down a rocky trail and the ultimate satisfaction of taking out a grueling climb, switchback after switchback, keep bikers riding the mountain trails around Fort Collins. For more and more local mountain bikers, the thrilling rides to be found all around Fort Collins have inspired them to give something back to the trails they love. They do it by donning the distinctive yellow jerseys of the Diamond Peaks Mountain Bike Patrol, an organization that has been educating mountain bikers on Front Range trails for 10 years. The growth and popularity of these patrols in recent years is hard to ignore. Diamond Peaks logged 521 patrols totaling 2,539 hours (106 full days) in 2007, double the patrols and triple the number of hours in the 2006 season....
Too little done to protect endangered species, lawsuit says Environmental groups on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against three federal agencies, alleging they have failed to protect dozens of endangered species that live in Southern California's four national forests from harmful impacts of off-roading, livestock grazing, roads and power lines. The legal action comes on the heels of a lawsuit California officials filed Feb. 28 against the U.S. Forest Service because the management plans for the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Angeles and Los Padres national forests permit road construction and oil drilling that have been long opposed by the state. The most recent lawsuit specifically targets so-called biological opinions issued in 2005 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service that assessed impacts on endangered species from those same forest management plans. The third target of Wednesday's lawsuit is the U.S. Forest Service. The environmental groups allege those opinions failed to consider ways to prevent harm to species by activities on forest lands, and failed to require any method for tracking how many plants and animals are killed because of those activities....
Off-road vehicle surge straining land agencies The Hayeses are part of a growing trend across the nation and Arizona. Off-road vehicle use has exploded in the past 10 years, straining land-management agencies and risking some of our most sensitive natural resources. State and federal officials are scrambling to deal with the roaring horde of ATV users. All national forests are assessing motorized use of trails, and a Glendale state representative has introduced a bill that would require ATV registration and a user fee to fund education and enforcement. His goal is to preserve access and the land. Rep. Jerry Weiers thinks his bill will pass this year. It passed in the House on Thursday and now goes to the Senate, where in 2007 it failed by one vote when several supporters were absent. Weiers' bill, which would take effect Jan. 1, is not aimed at restricting ATV users, said Jeff Gursh, an avid dirt biker who volunteers with the Arizona Off-Highway Vehicle Coalition. "All it does is give the land management agencies a tool for managing the land," he said. Weiers' bill would create an annual registration fee - estimated at $23 - for off-road vehicles and create a fund for ATV law enforcement, education and trail maintenance and construction. The registration fee would raise about $8 million per year, of which 70 percent would go to the new Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Fund and 30 percent to the existing Highway User Revenue Fund. Arizona State Parks would get 60 percent of the Recreation Fund, the state Game & Fish Department would get 35 percent and the State Land Department would get 5 percent....
Reserve-area residents fined for illegal outfitting, guiding A federal judge has fined three brothers—two outfitters and a guide—more than $7,000 after they were accused of violating regulations while outfitting or guiding hunters in the Gila National Forest. Michael DeLaO, Jamie DeLaO, and Carlos DeLaO, all from the Reserve area, were cited last year for not complying with federal and state special use permit requirements for commercial operations. U.S. Magistrate William P. Lynch recently sentenced the brothers on charges filed after an investigation by the state Department of Game and Fish and the Gila National Forest. Michael DeLaO, 29, pleaded guilty to noncompliance with U.S. Forest Service special use permits and use of an unauthorized guide and was fined $3,880. Jamie DeLaO, 34, pleaded guilty to the same charges and was fined $3,030. Carlos DeLaO, 36, pleaded guilty to operating a commercial business on Forest Service lands without a special use permit and unauthorized guiding on the forest, and was fined $325....
Mining proposal called wildlife threat Environmental groups have fired off a new round of court challenges to the proposed Rock Creek Mine, arguing that extracting silver and copper from beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness Area would result in the deaths of protected grizzly bears and bull trout. The lawsuits accuse federal agencies of violating the Endangered Species Act by approving the mine. "Grizzly and bull-trout populations are suffering. It's going to be hard for them to survive the industrialization of their habitat," said Jim Costello, Montana field organizer for the Rock Creek Alliance. The alliance is one of 10 groups involved in two separate lawsuits against the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The paperwork was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Missoula. Fifteen or fewer grizzlies are still believed to roam the Cabinet Mountains, a rugged range on the Idaho-Montana border. How the mine would affect grizzly bears, threatened bull trout and water quality in the Clark Fork River has been the subject of numerous lawsuits since the mine was first proposed in the 1980s. The Clark Fork River flows into Idaho's Lake Pend Oreille shortly after crossing the state line....
Marbled murrelet will keep territory Federal wildlife officials have dropped controversial plans to sharply reduce the area of critical habitat reserved for the marbled murrelet, a seabird known for standing in the way of Northwest logging. The decision reverses earlier efforts, supported by the timber industry, to scale back protections for the bird, which is classified as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. It could also complicate a proposal by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to accelerate logging in Oregon's Coast Range. The agency wants to produce more timber revenue in financially strapped coastal counties. In 2006, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed canceling about 95 percent of the designated critical habitat for the marbled murrelet, saying the area was already protected. But environmental groups complained that the move would pave the way for more intensive logging. Critical habitat comes into play mainly on federal land. Public land agencies must consult with wildlife biologists before proposing timber sales and other projects in critical habitat. The Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday that it would be inappropriate to reduce the habitat for the bird while the BLM is considering changes in managing the coastal lands....
Thousands of acres near Gunnison Gorge off limits to humans Thousands of acres near the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area will be off limits to humans to protect wildlife, including the threatened sage grouse, and prevent soil erosion. The 17,570 acres on parts of the Black Ridge and Fruitland mesas, west of the Gunnison Gorge Wilderness, will be closed to hiking, horseback, skiing, and motorized activity through April 30. Bureau of Land Management officials, who manage the land, fear snow and poor conditions on other nearby public lands could drive people to the area being closed....
Brazilian meat packers jump to top spot in U.S. A Brazilian firm is buying two of the top five beef processing companies in the United States, making it the nation's largest meat processor and drawing fire from a national cattle group over further concentration in the meatpacking industry. Smithfield Foods said Wednesday it is selling its beef operations for $565 million to Brazil's JBS SA, the second deal in two days for the Brazilian company. Smithfield Foods is the fifth-largest U.S. beef producer. On Tuesday, National Beef Packing Co., the nation's fourth-largest beef processor, said it is being acquired by JBS for cash and stock in a deal worth $560 million. The acquisitions will vault JBS past Cargill Meat Solutions for the top spot in U.S. meat processing companies. Randy Stevenson of Wheatland, Wyo., an official with R-CALF USA, said the moves, if approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, show the importance of getting competition reforms included in the new farm bill....
Festival celebrates Wallace Stegner's West Point Reyes Station, that oddly blended enclave of businesses, farms and artists in rural West Marin, is about to be invaded by hundreds of fans of the modern American West's foremost man of letters: Wallace Stegner. A three-day conference beginning Friday is being staged to salute both the never-ending battle to save Western wildlands and Stegner, who championed that cause up to the day he died in 1993 at age 84. It will be one of the greatest gatherings of Western literature writers willing to chew grass blades with anyone who cares to chat. For the uninitiated, "Western" writing has little to do these days with cowboy and Indian adventures. It instead means prose, poetry and research about the region from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast that has for more than a century defined the American essence of frontier mentality, individual ruggedness and wilderness. Authors such as John Steinbeck and Edward Abbey have earned renown here, but it's never been an easy publishing road. As Stegner himself discovered - even through penning the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Angle of Repose" and 27 other books - the West and its writers are often ignored by what many regard an Eastern-based literary snobbishness....
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
NOTE TO READERS
Got home late from a meeting of People For Preserving Our Western Heritage.
Will try to catch up on the rest of the news tomorrow.
Got home late from a meeting of People For Preserving Our Western Heritage.
Will try to catch up on the rest of the news tomorrow.
Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982. Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism. “The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.” The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society. Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose. “[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”....
Dispatches from the International Conference on Climate Change Michaels then turned to various climate change puzzles. Is Antarctica melting, he asked? Exhibit A in the Antarctica warming story is the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula. However, as Michaels showed, the peninsula is a very small area of the southern continent and most of Antarctica shows no warming trend. In fact, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), released in 2007, found that "current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting." Michaels sardonically noted that former Vice President Al Gore did not say that sea level would rise by 20 feet in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth; he just showed animations of such a sea-level rise. What about Greenland? Michaels displayed temperature records showing that Greenland's temperatures had been higher in the earlier part of the 20th century. In particular he cited a 2006 study by Danish researchers who reported, "The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades." Michaels suggested that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice annually. He further noted that there are about 690,000 cubic miles of ice locked up in Greenland's ice cap. At that rate of melting, Greenland's ice cap would shrink by less than 0.4 percent over the next century. According to recent reports, Greenland's ice cap is now losing about 57 cubic miles of ice annually. If that rate were sustained over the next 100 years, a little over 0.8 percent of the ice cap would melt away into the oceans. Michaels also talked about the recent steep reduction in summer Arctic sea ice. However, he pointed to research by UCLA biological geographer Glen MacDonald and his colleagues who found that the Eurasian tree line reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Ocean 9,000 to 7,000 years ago. Why? Because "the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0° celsius warmer than modern [ones]." This implies considerably reduced Arctic sea ice cover lasting for centuries in the past. Michaels noted in passing that polar bears survived that warmer period....
Should biotech piggy go to market? In January, when the FDA declared that cloned animals and their progeny are safe to eat, it opened the door to genetic engineering, a prospect that hasn't been widely reported, but one that has plenty of consumer advocates concerned. For livestock professionals like Kelley, the FDA's decision, and a meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture held in late November to seek guidance on how to work with transgenic animals, signal that the U.S. is primed to consider the public's appetite for G.E. animals. They say it is a sign that the agency is beginning to take more seriously the job of creating regulations for G.E. animals. To clone an animal, a cell nucleus is taken from an "elite" animal, implanted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed, cultivated into an embryo in a lab, and then implanted in the womb of a surrogate "mother" of the same species. To genetically engineer an animal, scientists splice foreign genes, generally from some other type of animal, into a nucleus, and then implant the modified embryo into a host mother. Creating a transgenic animal is incredibly difficult and expensive, prone to mistakes that can cause the premature death of animals. "Genetic engineering doesn't work all that well," says Hanson. He points out that once genetic farmers produce the perfect animal through trial and error, they will save a tremendous amount of money by cloning its genotype -- which is why they welcome the FDA ruling. "When they find it works in an animal, they want to copy it with cloning," Hanson says. "Cloning is how you Xerox your success."....
California cows start passing gas to the grid Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep. Meet California's most alternative new energy. On a dairy farm in the Golden State's agricultural heartland, utility PG&E Corp began on Tuesday producing natural gas derived from manure, in what it hopes will be a new way to power homes with renewable, if not entirely clean, energy. The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, the brainchild of life- long dairyman David Albers, aims to provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day, Albers said at the facility's inauguration ceremony. In addition to being a partner in the 5,000-head Vintage Dairy, Albers is also president of BioEnergy Solutions, the company that funded and built the facility which cost millions of dollars. PG&E is simply a customer and the companies declined to give details of project finances. As cow manure decomposes, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. As luck would have it, methane can be captured and treated to produce renewable gas, and California regulators have directed PG&E and other utilities to make renewable energy at least 20 percent of their electricity supplies by 2010....So, will we be cloning cows based on how much gas - they can pass - to the grid?....Will vegans refuse to use the gas?
Dispatches from the International Conference on Climate Change Michaels then turned to various climate change puzzles. Is Antarctica melting, he asked? Exhibit A in the Antarctica warming story is the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula. However, as Michaels showed, the peninsula is a very small area of the southern continent and most of Antarctica shows no warming trend. In fact, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), released in 2007, found that "current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting." Michaels sardonically noted that former Vice President Al Gore did not say that sea level would rise by 20 feet in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth; he just showed animations of such a sea-level rise. What about Greenland? Michaels displayed temperature records showing that Greenland's temperatures had been higher in the earlier part of the 20th century. In particular he cited a 2006 study by Danish researchers who reported, "The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades." Michaels suggested that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice annually. He further noted that there are about 690,000 cubic miles of ice locked up in Greenland's ice cap. At that rate of melting, Greenland's ice cap would shrink by less than 0.4 percent over the next century. According to recent reports, Greenland's ice cap is now losing about 57 cubic miles of ice annually. If that rate were sustained over the next 100 years, a little over 0.8 percent of the ice cap would melt away into the oceans. Michaels also talked about the recent steep reduction in summer Arctic sea ice. However, he pointed to research by UCLA biological geographer Glen MacDonald and his colleagues who found that the Eurasian tree line reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Ocean 9,000 to 7,000 years ago. Why? Because "the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0° celsius warmer than modern [ones]." This implies considerably reduced Arctic sea ice cover lasting for centuries in the past. Michaels noted in passing that polar bears survived that warmer period....
Should biotech piggy go to market? In January, when the FDA declared that cloned animals and their progeny are safe to eat, it opened the door to genetic engineering, a prospect that hasn't been widely reported, but one that has plenty of consumer advocates concerned. For livestock professionals like Kelley, the FDA's decision, and a meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture held in late November to seek guidance on how to work with transgenic animals, signal that the U.S. is primed to consider the public's appetite for G.E. animals. They say it is a sign that the agency is beginning to take more seriously the job of creating regulations for G.E. animals. To clone an animal, a cell nucleus is taken from an "elite" animal, implanted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed, cultivated into an embryo in a lab, and then implanted in the womb of a surrogate "mother" of the same species. To genetically engineer an animal, scientists splice foreign genes, generally from some other type of animal, into a nucleus, and then implant the modified embryo into a host mother. Creating a transgenic animal is incredibly difficult and expensive, prone to mistakes that can cause the premature death of animals. "Genetic engineering doesn't work all that well," says Hanson. He points out that once genetic farmers produce the perfect animal through trial and error, they will save a tremendous amount of money by cloning its genotype -- which is why they welcome the FDA ruling. "When they find it works in an animal, they want to copy it with cloning," Hanson says. "Cloning is how you Xerox your success."....
California cows start passing gas to the grid Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep. Meet California's most alternative new energy. On a dairy farm in the Golden State's agricultural heartland, utility PG&E Corp began on Tuesday producing natural gas derived from manure, in what it hopes will be a new way to power homes with renewable, if not entirely clean, energy. The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, the brainchild of life- long dairyman David Albers, aims to provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day, Albers said at the facility's inauguration ceremony. In addition to being a partner in the 5,000-head Vintage Dairy, Albers is also president of BioEnergy Solutions, the company that funded and built the facility which cost millions of dollars. PG&E is simply a customer and the companies declined to give details of project finances. As cow manure decomposes, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. As luck would have it, methane can be captured and treated to produce renewable gas, and California regulators have directed PG&E and other utilities to make renewable energy at least 20 percent of their electricity supplies by 2010....So, will we be cloning cows based on how much gas - they can pass - to the grid?....Will vegans refuse to use the gas?
FLE
Polls show Americans approve of... some stuff we just made up EVEN by the fast-and-loose standards of political rhetoric, the ongoing debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—and the related bid to provide retroactive legal amnesty for telecoms that participated in warrantless wiretaps—is an astonishing farrago of misinformation. It is truly difficult to convey briefly, if you have not been following the issue closely, the stunning mendacity with which these twin goals—expanded warrantless wiretap authority and telecom immunity—have been pursued. Yet even by the standards of this incredibly dishonest debate, a new survey being touted by Newt Gingrich's American Solutions group is simply jaw-dropping. The survey purports to show that Americans overwhelmingly approve of both the surveillance powers and the grant of immunity sought by the president and his allies. Yet the two central questions posed to survey respondents were premised on clear falsehoods. It is almost impressive how many different lies and misrepresentations the survey takers managed to squeeze into each sentence. It is simply false that the Protect America Act permits acquisitions only of "calls and e-mails originating overseas". The "target" of the surveillance must be abroad, but the communication may originate in the United States. It is simply false that either the sender or the recipient of the communication must be "a person suspected of having links to terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda". Surveillance may be conducted on any person abroad, provided that "a significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information". That information need not have anything to do with terrorism, and even if the investigation is terror-related, the target need not be a suspected terrorist or supporter of terror. It is simply, emphatically false that "the government no longer has the ability to legally monitor the phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists overseas without a warrant". Indeed, it is false in several ways....
Smugglers hide in plain sight The dirt bikes and dune buggies swarm the sandy slopes by the thousands, turning these giant dunes at California's southeast border into anthills of frenetic activity. Smugglers in nearby Mexico can't resist trying to blend into the crowd. They shoot across the border in souped-up vehicles loaded with illegal immigrants and drugs and elude U.S. Border Patrol agents by playing the part of dune enthusiasts: wearing helmets and decorating their bikes and all-terrain vehicles with decals and flags. The cat-and-mouse game turned deadly recently when a suspected smuggler driving a Hummer ran over an agent and fled back across the border over the dunes. The agent's death focused attention on the federal government's enforcement strategy in this remote corner of the border. While the Department of Homeland Security expands fencing in other trouble spots on the Southwest frontier, officials say fortifying the border at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area has been difficult because of shifting sands that render current barriers ineffective. By the end of the year, they say, they will have erected a new type of fortification that they hope will cut down on incursions....
Immigrants still broach U.S. border despite fences Daily, U.S. Border Patrol agents in this Arizona town faced groups of up to 200 illegal immigrants who would swarm across the border from Mexico, sprinting past the agents to a new life in the United States. That was until 18 months ago, when the single fence was bolstered by two taller, steel barriers, watched over by video cameras and lit by a blaze of stadium lighting. Now the incursions known by the agents as "Banzai Runs" have all but stopped. "It was overwhelming," said agent Andrew Patterson. "This used to be a huge trouble area, now we are almost down to zero." While they are controversial -- some border landowners resent what they see as unwelcome government intrusion and some conservationists argue it disrupts wildlife flows -- border police say this stretch of new fencing has been highly effective. "It has been a massive success. It has allowed our agents to gain control over the area and acted as a deterrent for people thinking of crossing," said Jeremy Schappell, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's Yuma sector, which includes San Luis. A new single layer of steel mesh fence 10-13 feet (3-4 meters) tall stretches out across the rugged, high plains deserts and grasslands on either side of the small town of Naco, Arizona. The Border Patrol credits it with contributing to a fall in arrests, but some residents say it has done little to stop illegal immigrants. Local rancher John Ladd said some 300 to 400 illegal immigrants continue to clamber over the new steel barrier flanking the southern reach of his farm for some 10 miles (16 km) each day, as an effective combination of technologies and manpower remains elusive. "It's so easy to climb that I've seen two women that were pregnant, I've seen several women in their sixties and all kinds of kids between five and ten years old climb over it," Ladd said, as he leaned on a section of the steel mesh fence that stretches like a rusted veil westward toward the rugged Huachuca Mountains. "They're getting some help, but when you put it in perspective, its pretty amazing to have a nine-month pregnant woman climbing over that son of a gun, and thinking that this is going to be the answer to solve our immigration problem."....
Reality Sets In For The Virtual Fence The "virtual fence" that was supposed to help secure our borders will be delayed for years due to poor planning and technical difficulties. Unfortunately, terrorists and illegal aliens are quite real. Remember the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which required the construction of 700 miles of new border fence? It required a real fence modeled on the success of the barriers in the San Diego sector of the U.S. border. The operative word is "secure." The legislation specifically called for "two layers of reinforced fencing" and listed five specific sections of the border where it should be built. Last year's omnibus spending bill removed the requirement for two tiers and the specific list of locations. But according to an amendment by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson that was adopted: "Nothing in this paragraph shall require the secretary of homeland security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads lighting, cameras and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location." Hutchinson's office said the amendment merely gave DHS flexibility. What it provided was an excuse to do nothing and a license for open-border politicians to pressure DHS. DHS is on record as preferring in many instances "pedestrian fences" or "virtual fences," which are a look-but-can't-touch version of border security. Well, guess what? The highly touted virtual fence doesn't work, or at least nobody at DHS can prove it works. And it'll take at least three more years to make it work. That's lot of illegal border crossings before the Department of Motor Vehicles, er, Homeland Security gets its act together....
Agencies' merger spawns tension, arrests Bribery. Drug trafficking. Migrant smuggling. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to stop these types of crimes. But instead, so many of its officers have been charged with committing those crimes themselves that their boss in Washington recently issued an alert about the ''disturbing events'' and the ``increase in the number of employee arrests.'' Thomas S. Winkowski, assistant commissioner of field operations, wrote a memo to more than 20,000 officers nationwide noting that employees must behave professionally at all times -- even when they are not on the job. Winkowski's memo cites several employee arrests involving domestic violence, driving under the influence and drug possession. But court records show that CBP officers and other Department of Homeland Security employees from South Florida to the Mexican border states have been charged with dozens of far more serious offenses. Among them: A Customs and Border Protection officer at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport was charged in February with conspiring to assist a New York drug ring under investigation by tapping into sensitive federal databases. Other recent South Florida cases -- mirroring a pattern on the border states -- have involved officers and agents accepting illegal payoffs for migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, witness tampering, embezzlement and rape. CBP and ICE managers say these cases simply reflect individual criminal behavior, not the culture of the married agencies. But some longtime employees said administrative incidents, such as hostile confrontations or heavy drinking, may reflect the low morale and intense rivalries following the merger of federal agencies under Homeland Security....Bush caved and agreed to federalize airport screeners and create the TSA, then caved again to create the Dept. of Homeland Security.
Feds warn states of ID deadline, travel hassles Homeland Security officials are pushing recalcitrant states to adopt stricter driver's license standards to end a standoff that could disrupt domestic air travel. States have less than a month to send a letter to the Homeland Security Department seeking an extension to comply with the Real ID law passed following the 2001 terror attacks. Some states have resisted, saying it is costly, impractical and an invasion of privacy. Four states — Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina — have yet to seek an extension. To bring the states in line, Chertoff warned that any state that does not seek an extension by the end of March will find that, come May, their residents will not be able to use their licenses to board domestic flights. Chertoff's assistant secretary, Stewart Baker, sent letters to several governors Monday reminding them of the looming deadline, and urging the holdouts to seek an extension. In recent years, 17 states passed legislation or resolutions opposing Real ID, but now only a handful appear willing to challenge the government publicly. Officials in Maine and Montana insisted Monday they would not seek an extension. A spokesman for South Carolina's governor said he was still considering it. New Hampshire passed a law last year prohibiting the state from participating in the Real ID program, and Gov. John Lynch wrote Chertoff last week asking him not to impose the requirements on New Hampshire citizens....
Congress to Probe TSA, Flight Schools The failure of the federal government to follow new laws restricting access of non-U.S. citizens to flight schools is part of a "failure on every level" by the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, says Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. ABC News reported last week that thousands of non-U.S. citizens had attended flight schools and received FAA pilot licenses without going through new requirements specified in post-9/ll laws. Oberstar has set hearings for next week on "other significant lapses," featuring FAA whistle-blower Bill McNease, who appeared in the ABC News report. "We cannot let another 9/ll happen because we were lax in enforcing our own laws," Oberstar said. Oberstar said McNease and other witnesses "will provide evidence of numerous, serious failures in FAA's regulatory oversight."
Citizens’ group suggests investigation of ammunition coding campaign The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today is calling on lawmakers in the states of Washington, Arizona, New York, Illinois, Hawaii and several other states to scrutinize legislation that would require ammunition coding, because it mandates a soul source monopoly for a Seattle-based company that owns the technology. Based on a story in the new edition of Gun Week, and a look at virtually identical legislation that has been introduced in several states, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said there are serious questions that need to be addressed about these measures, and the effort to pass them into law. “Sponsors of bills that would require coding of cartridge casings and bullets in their respective states have neglected to mention that there is only one company in the country with the technology, and that company has been working with a ‘hired-gun’ consulting firm that offers its help to lawmakers drafting the legislation,” Gottlieb said. “Essentially, you have state legislators working as promoters for a company called Ammunition Coding System, pushing measures in at least ten states that would mandate the use of this proprietary technology at the expense of gun owners. “Even if the technology were licensed to various ammunition manufacturers,” he continued, “it still puts one company in a monopoly position. On its own website, the company even acknowledges that legislation would be required to implement what many gun owners believe is a back-door gun registry, by forcing dealers to keep records on who purchases ammunition. “Creating a technology, and applying for a patent while hiring a consulting firm to push legislation that requires this technology is horribly self-serving,” Gottlieb added. “The fact that in every state these measures are being pushed, the sponsors are anti-gun lawmakers, simply adds to the suspicion....
Government records incorrectly kill off thousands For a dead woman, Laura Todd is awfully articulate. “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to be dead when you’re not,” said Todd, who is very much alive and kicking in Nashville, Tenn., even though the federal government has said otherwise for many years. Todd’s struggle started eight years ago with a typo in government records. The government has reassured her numerous times that it has cleared up the confusion, but the problems keep coming. Most recently, the IRS — again — rejected her electronic tax return. “I will not be eligible for my refund. I’m not eligible for my rebate,” she said. “I mean, I can’t do anything with it.” Laura Todd is not alone. She is one of tens of thousands of living, breathing Americans whom the federal government has wrongly declared dead — by one measure, more than 35 a day....See folks, we really have no reason to be concerned about all these gov't databases. We can trust the competency of the civil servants and the integrity of our elected officials, can't we?
Polls show Americans approve of... some stuff we just made up EVEN by the fast-and-loose standards of political rhetoric, the ongoing debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—and the related bid to provide retroactive legal amnesty for telecoms that participated in warrantless wiretaps—is an astonishing farrago of misinformation. It is truly difficult to convey briefly, if you have not been following the issue closely, the stunning mendacity with which these twin goals—expanded warrantless wiretap authority and telecom immunity—have been pursued. Yet even by the standards of this incredibly dishonest debate, a new survey being touted by Newt Gingrich's American Solutions group is simply jaw-dropping. The survey purports to show that Americans overwhelmingly approve of both the surveillance powers and the grant of immunity sought by the president and his allies. Yet the two central questions posed to survey respondents were premised on clear falsehoods. It is almost impressive how many different lies and misrepresentations the survey takers managed to squeeze into each sentence. It is simply false that the Protect America Act permits acquisitions only of "calls and e-mails originating overseas". The "target" of the surveillance must be abroad, but the communication may originate in the United States. It is simply false that either the sender or the recipient of the communication must be "a person suspected of having links to terrorist organisations such as al-Qaeda". Surveillance may be conducted on any person abroad, provided that "a significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information". That information need not have anything to do with terrorism, and even if the investigation is terror-related, the target need not be a suspected terrorist or supporter of terror. It is simply, emphatically false that "the government no longer has the ability to legally monitor the phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists overseas without a warrant". Indeed, it is false in several ways....
Smugglers hide in plain sight The dirt bikes and dune buggies swarm the sandy slopes by the thousands, turning these giant dunes at California's southeast border into anthills of frenetic activity. Smugglers in nearby Mexico can't resist trying to blend into the crowd. They shoot across the border in souped-up vehicles loaded with illegal immigrants and drugs and elude U.S. Border Patrol agents by playing the part of dune enthusiasts: wearing helmets and decorating their bikes and all-terrain vehicles with decals and flags. The cat-and-mouse game turned deadly recently when a suspected smuggler driving a Hummer ran over an agent and fled back across the border over the dunes. The agent's death focused attention on the federal government's enforcement strategy in this remote corner of the border. While the Department of Homeland Security expands fencing in other trouble spots on the Southwest frontier, officials say fortifying the border at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area has been difficult because of shifting sands that render current barriers ineffective. By the end of the year, they say, they will have erected a new type of fortification that they hope will cut down on incursions....
Immigrants still broach U.S. border despite fences Daily, U.S. Border Patrol agents in this Arizona town faced groups of up to 200 illegal immigrants who would swarm across the border from Mexico, sprinting past the agents to a new life in the United States. That was until 18 months ago, when the single fence was bolstered by two taller, steel barriers, watched over by video cameras and lit by a blaze of stadium lighting. Now the incursions known by the agents as "Banzai Runs" have all but stopped. "It was overwhelming," said agent Andrew Patterson. "This used to be a huge trouble area, now we are almost down to zero." While they are controversial -- some border landowners resent what they see as unwelcome government intrusion and some conservationists argue it disrupts wildlife flows -- border police say this stretch of new fencing has been highly effective. "It has been a massive success. It has allowed our agents to gain control over the area and acted as a deterrent for people thinking of crossing," said Jeremy Schappell, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's Yuma sector, which includes San Luis. A new single layer of steel mesh fence 10-13 feet (3-4 meters) tall stretches out across the rugged, high plains deserts and grasslands on either side of the small town of Naco, Arizona. The Border Patrol credits it with contributing to a fall in arrests, but some residents say it has done little to stop illegal immigrants. Local rancher John Ladd said some 300 to 400 illegal immigrants continue to clamber over the new steel barrier flanking the southern reach of his farm for some 10 miles (16 km) each day, as an effective combination of technologies and manpower remains elusive. "It's so easy to climb that I've seen two women that were pregnant, I've seen several women in their sixties and all kinds of kids between five and ten years old climb over it," Ladd said, as he leaned on a section of the steel mesh fence that stretches like a rusted veil westward toward the rugged Huachuca Mountains. "They're getting some help, but when you put it in perspective, its pretty amazing to have a nine-month pregnant woman climbing over that son of a gun, and thinking that this is going to be the answer to solve our immigration problem."....
Reality Sets In For The Virtual Fence The "virtual fence" that was supposed to help secure our borders will be delayed for years due to poor planning and technical difficulties. Unfortunately, terrorists and illegal aliens are quite real. Remember the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which required the construction of 700 miles of new border fence? It required a real fence modeled on the success of the barriers in the San Diego sector of the U.S. border. The operative word is "secure." The legislation specifically called for "two layers of reinforced fencing" and listed five specific sections of the border where it should be built. Last year's omnibus spending bill removed the requirement for two tiers and the specific list of locations. But according to an amendment by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson that was adopted: "Nothing in this paragraph shall require the secretary of homeland security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads lighting, cameras and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location." Hutchinson's office said the amendment merely gave DHS flexibility. What it provided was an excuse to do nothing and a license for open-border politicians to pressure DHS. DHS is on record as preferring in many instances "pedestrian fences" or "virtual fences," which are a look-but-can't-touch version of border security. Well, guess what? The highly touted virtual fence doesn't work, or at least nobody at DHS can prove it works. And it'll take at least three more years to make it work. That's lot of illegal border crossings before the Department of Motor Vehicles, er, Homeland Security gets its act together....
Agencies' merger spawns tension, arrests Bribery. Drug trafficking. Migrant smuggling. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to stop these types of crimes. But instead, so many of its officers have been charged with committing those crimes themselves that their boss in Washington recently issued an alert about the ''disturbing events'' and the ``increase in the number of employee arrests.'' Thomas S. Winkowski, assistant commissioner of field operations, wrote a memo to more than 20,000 officers nationwide noting that employees must behave professionally at all times -- even when they are not on the job. Winkowski's memo cites several employee arrests involving domestic violence, driving under the influence and drug possession. But court records show that CBP officers and other Department of Homeland Security employees from South Florida to the Mexican border states have been charged with dozens of far more serious offenses. Among them: A Customs and Border Protection officer at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport was charged in February with conspiring to assist a New York drug ring under investigation by tapping into sensitive federal databases. Other recent South Florida cases -- mirroring a pattern on the border states -- have involved officers and agents accepting illegal payoffs for migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, witness tampering, embezzlement and rape. CBP and ICE managers say these cases simply reflect individual criminal behavior, not the culture of the married agencies. But some longtime employees said administrative incidents, such as hostile confrontations or heavy drinking, may reflect the low morale and intense rivalries following the merger of federal agencies under Homeland Security....Bush caved and agreed to federalize airport screeners and create the TSA, then caved again to create the Dept. of Homeland Security.
Feds warn states of ID deadline, travel hassles Homeland Security officials are pushing recalcitrant states to adopt stricter driver's license standards to end a standoff that could disrupt domestic air travel. States have less than a month to send a letter to the Homeland Security Department seeking an extension to comply with the Real ID law passed following the 2001 terror attacks. Some states have resisted, saying it is costly, impractical and an invasion of privacy. Four states — Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina — have yet to seek an extension. To bring the states in line, Chertoff warned that any state that does not seek an extension by the end of March will find that, come May, their residents will not be able to use their licenses to board domestic flights. Chertoff's assistant secretary, Stewart Baker, sent letters to several governors Monday reminding them of the looming deadline, and urging the holdouts to seek an extension. In recent years, 17 states passed legislation or resolutions opposing Real ID, but now only a handful appear willing to challenge the government publicly. Officials in Maine and Montana insisted Monday they would not seek an extension. A spokesman for South Carolina's governor said he was still considering it. New Hampshire passed a law last year prohibiting the state from participating in the Real ID program, and Gov. John Lynch wrote Chertoff last week asking him not to impose the requirements on New Hampshire citizens....
Congress to Probe TSA, Flight Schools The failure of the federal government to follow new laws restricting access of non-U.S. citizens to flight schools is part of a "failure on every level" by the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, says Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. ABC News reported last week that thousands of non-U.S. citizens had attended flight schools and received FAA pilot licenses without going through new requirements specified in post-9/ll laws. Oberstar has set hearings for next week on "other significant lapses," featuring FAA whistle-blower Bill McNease, who appeared in the ABC News report. "We cannot let another 9/ll happen because we were lax in enforcing our own laws," Oberstar said. Oberstar said McNease and other witnesses "will provide evidence of numerous, serious failures in FAA's regulatory oversight."
Citizens’ group suggests investigation of ammunition coding campaign The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today is calling on lawmakers in the states of Washington, Arizona, New York, Illinois, Hawaii and several other states to scrutinize legislation that would require ammunition coding, because it mandates a soul source monopoly for a Seattle-based company that owns the technology. Based on a story in the new edition of Gun Week, and a look at virtually identical legislation that has been introduced in several states, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said there are serious questions that need to be addressed about these measures, and the effort to pass them into law. “Sponsors of bills that would require coding of cartridge casings and bullets in their respective states have neglected to mention that there is only one company in the country with the technology, and that company has been working with a ‘hired-gun’ consulting firm that offers its help to lawmakers drafting the legislation,” Gottlieb said. “Essentially, you have state legislators working as promoters for a company called Ammunition Coding System, pushing measures in at least ten states that would mandate the use of this proprietary technology at the expense of gun owners. “Even if the technology were licensed to various ammunition manufacturers,” he continued, “it still puts one company in a monopoly position. On its own website, the company even acknowledges that legislation would be required to implement what many gun owners believe is a back-door gun registry, by forcing dealers to keep records on who purchases ammunition. “Creating a technology, and applying for a patent while hiring a consulting firm to push legislation that requires this technology is horribly self-serving,” Gottlieb added. “The fact that in every state these measures are being pushed, the sponsors are anti-gun lawmakers, simply adds to the suspicion....
Government records incorrectly kill off thousands For a dead woman, Laura Todd is awfully articulate. “I don’t think people realize how difficult it is to be dead when you’re not,” said Todd, who is very much alive and kicking in Nashville, Tenn., even though the federal government has said otherwise for many years. Todd’s struggle started eight years ago with a typo in government records. The government has reassured her numerous times that it has cleared up the confusion, but the problems keep coming. Most recently, the IRS — again — rejected her electronic tax return. “I will not be eligible for my refund. I’m not eligible for my rebate,” she said. “I mean, I can’t do anything with it.” Laura Todd is not alone. She is one of tens of thousands of living, breathing Americans whom the federal government has wrongly declared dead — by one measure, more than 35 a day....See folks, we really have no reason to be concerned about all these gov't databases. We can trust the competency of the civil servants and the integrity of our elected officials, can't we?
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Cool And The Gang Knut the polar bear isn't so cute and cuddly anymore. He's grown up a tad and is now a killing machine capable of surviving in perhaps the Earth's most hostile environment — the Arctic. Nor is the poster animal for warming warnings that drive children to tears and his kind in danger of perishing anytime soon. Funny thing about ice: It melts in summer and thickens in winter. And according to Gilles Kangis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice service in Ottawa, this Arctic winter has been so severe that the continent's allegedly vanishing ice is 10 to 20 centimeters thicker than it was at this time a year ago. Recent satellite images, moreover, show the polar ice cap is at near-normal coverage levels, according to Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. This is a consequence of what we recently commented on: The sun, the greatest influence on earth's climate, seems to be entering an unusually quiet cycle of limited sunspot activity. As Kenneth Tapping of Canada's National Research Council warns, we may be in for severely cold weather if sunspot activity doesn't pick up. Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." The last time the sun was this quiet, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age, which lasted five centuries and ended in 1850. The winter at Valley Forge, a famous part of history, occurred during this period. It's a good time, therefore, for some of the best climate scientists in the world to be gathering in New York City — setting for the Al Gore-promoted doomsday flick "The Day After Tomorrow" — for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change hosted by the Heartland Institute. More than 550 climate scientists, economists and public policy experts are at March 2-4 event, their very presence shattering Gore's myth of a warming "consensus" and a debate that is over. Yet because of the media's embrace of Gore's crusade, this may be one of the few places you read about the conference....
Luxury Homes Burn in Apparent Eco-Attack Three seven-figure dream homes went up in flames early Monday in a Seattle suburb, apparently set by eco-terrorists who left a sign mocking the builders' claims that the 4,000-plus-square-foot houses were environmentally friendly. The sign — a sheet marked with spray paint — bore the initials ELF, for Earth Liberation Front, a loose collection of radical environmentalists that has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks since the 1990s. The sheriff's office estimated that Monday's pre-dawn fires did $7 million in damage to the "Street of Dreams," a row of unoccupied, furnished luxury model homes where tens of thousands of visitors last summer eyed the latest in high-end housing, interior design and landscaping. Three homes were destroyed and two suffered smoke damage. The FBI was investigating the fires as a potential domestic terrorism act, said FBI spokesman Rich Kolko in Washington, D.C....
On the Earth Liberation Front Arson is a strange way to defend the Earth. The hardcore environmental activists behind the Earth Liberation Front disagree. According to the Associated Press, the group has previously taken credit (if it can be called that) for several arsons in the northwest of the United States. They've attacked U.S. Forest Service buildings and a Colorado ski resort, the latter assault doing US$12-million in damage. In one case, the ELF burned down a horticulture building at the University of Washington because they were angry that researchers therein were genetically engineering trees. Actually, researchers weren't doing anything of the sort in the building. They were too busy preserving endangered plants and restoring wetlands. But by the time someone told the ELF that, it had already done about US$7-million of damage. The genetically-engineered poplars that the ELF was so exercised about were actually housed in a separate building that was untouched by the attack. Now, separate fires in 4 luxury show homes in a Seattle suburb look like the ELF's latest handiwork. (A sign bearing the initials "ELF" and complaining "Built Green? Nope black!" was left on the scene.)....
New houses becoming popular targets The Earth Liberation Front has its roots in the militant opposition to logging of old-growth forests. Beginning in 1996, an underground group launched more than a dozen arsons against targets that included the U.S. Forest Service, timber companies, a horse slaughterhouse, a car dealership and a University of Washington researcher believed to be genetically engineering poplar trees. But in recent years, new housing developments popping up on the urban fringes have become the most high-profile targets claimed by the ELF. Those attacks include a 2002 arson that destroyed a San Diego apartment complex and caused $50 million in damage, and a 2000 torching of a luxury housing development in Mount Sinai, N.Y. "If you build it, we will burn it," was the graffiti left at the scene of the New York fire, according to The New York Times....
NYT Term for Eco-Terrorists: 'Anti-Sprawl Activists' Opening paragraph from the New York Times article on the eco-terrorists who burned three new homes north of Seattle today [emphasis added]: For people who are anti-sprawl activists — or have baser motives — a new-built house sitting empty in a previously rural area evidently makes a ripe target for an attack by fire. Consider also the article's headline "House Fires With a Message in the Northwest." Yes, think of it as a bonus. Not just a housefire . . . a housefire with a message!
Environmental activist pleads not guilty Three days after his extradition from Canada, environmental activist and ex-fugitive Tre Arrow pleaded not guilty to arson and conspiracy charges in federal court Monday and was ordered held as a flight risk and public danger pending trial. Arrow, 34, who has legally changed his name from Michael Scarpitti, is charged in a 14-count federal indictment with helping to destroy concrete-mixing trucks at Ross Island Sand and Gravel Company in Portland in April 2001 and of firebombing logging trucks at Schoppert Logging Co. in Eagle Creek near Mount Hood in June 2001. He was returned to Portland Friday after fighting extradition for four years from a prison in British Columbia. Before his arrest in Canada, he was a fugitive from the FBI for 19 months. Dressed in a blue prison uniform, Arrow clasped his hands together, smiled and bowed in the courtroom as he was led to the defense table. He did not speak during the brief arraignment. U.S. District Judge Paul Hubel ordered him held pending a possible detention hearing. Through his attorney Paul Loney, Arrow requested that he be given a raw vegan diet in accordance with his religious beliefs, and a court official said that probably could be accommodated. Hubel asked that it be done as quickly as possible....
Are Wolves The Pronghorn's Best Friend? As western states debate removing the gray wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act, a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society cautions that doing so may result in an unintended decline in another species: the pronghorn, a uniquely North American animal that resembles an African antelope. The study, appearing in the latest issue of the journal Ecology, says that fewer wolves mean more coyotes, which can prey heavily on pronghorn fawns if the delicate balance between predators and their prey is altered. According to the study, healthy wolf packs keep coyote numbers in check, while rarely feeding on pronghorn fawns themselves. As a result, fawns have higher survival rates when wolves are present in an ecosystem. Over a three-year period, researchers radio-collared more than 100 fawns in wolf-free and wolf-abundant areas of Grand Teton National Park and monitored their survival throughout the summer. The results showed that only 10 percent of fawns survived in areas lacking wolves, but where coyote densities were higher. In areas where wolves were abundant, 34 percent of pronghorn fawns survived. Wolves reduce coyote numbers by killing them outright or by causing them to shift to safer areas of the Park not utilized by wolves....
Annual drilling restrictions take effect in Wyoming Annual restrictions that ban most energy-related activities within two miles of active sage grouse breeding areas on federal land are now in effect for the next three and a half months in Wyoming. Last Saturday marked the first day of the restrictions. The federal regulations hit Campbell County especially hard last year and are expected to have a significant impact this year. State and private lands where the regulations do not apply are increasingly drilled out, forcing coal-bed methane companies onto more federal land. In addition, last week, a federal judge decided to hold the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to a May 2009 deadline to decide whether to list the sage grouse as an endangered species, ignoring the service's request for an extension of the deadline. The decision will also require the service to do a new report on the bird, and give the public 60 days to comment on that report. The report is due in November....
BLM report says drilling would boost gas leakage A court challenge to increased coal-bed methane development on the Atlantic Rim has yielded a document that contradicts the Bureau of Land Management's public position on whether new drilling will cause more gas seepage from the ground. Erik Molvar, wildlife biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, said court records resulting from a lawsuit filed by his organization and four other groups contains a document from the BLM about how drilling has boosted the number of methane gas seeps on the Atlantic Rim. The lawsuit was filed after the BLM approved a 2,000-well project on Atlantic Rim, on the eastern edge of the Red Desert in southern Wyoming. The BLM document, prepared by a petroleum engineer, states that when BLM officials toured the area, they found the level of activity at known methane gas seep sites had "increased dramatically since the commencement of coal-bed methane" development "in the immediate vicinity." BLM officials and others who have looked at the methane seeps agree that some seeps have been in the area for years. Dispute centers on the recent increased activity witnessed at those seeps....
Conflict seen in smelt rules Water users who benefit most from tapping the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have been given an unprecedented role in drafting new rules to manage water diversions. Critics call it a "fox in the henhouse" situation that may further imperil the Delta, where experts believe water diversions have already contributed to a broad ecosystem collapse. The new draft rules, called a biological assessment, are being prepared in response to a court order last year. Federal Judge Oliver Wanger in Fresno declared existing rules inadequate to protect the threatened Delta smelt. He set a Sept. 12 deadline to rewrite the rules. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates one of two Delta water systems, is a defendant in the case. The bureau allowed water contractors to help write new diversion rules. Wanger, in his ruling, didn't specify who should rewrite the rules. The decision also applies to its co-defendant, the state Department of Water Resources, which operates the other diversion system, and its contractors....
Eminent domain hovers over Monument woman's property For 30 years, Georgia Ward has lived on 40 picturesque acres south of town, the perfect place for horses to roam and graze and drink from Monument Creek. But a Monument road could one day run through Ward’s land, dividing it in two and leaving the eastern two-thirds of it cut off and useless, Ward said. “Who would ever want it then?” Ward said last week. The town wants to connect Mitchell Road, which dead-ends at the south end of town, to Forest Lakes Boulevard, which curves north from Baptist Road west of Interstate 25. To make way for the road, the town plans to use eminent domain to seize an 80-foot-wide strip of land crossing Ward’s property. Eminent domain is a touchy subject among northern El Paso County landowners after the Lewis-Palmer School District in 2006 raised the specter of condemnation to obtain land for a new high school. The school district backed down in the face of fierce protests that included a threatened recall when the descendants of the pioneer family who still lived on the Wissler Ranch went public that they were being pressured to sell....
No Global Warming Crisis To see if all this makes any sense there are really four questions that all have to be answered "yes." 1) Are global temperatures rising? Surely, they were rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but "there has been no net global warming since 1998." Indeed, the more recent numbers show that there is now evidence of significant cooling. 2) But supposing that the answer to the first question is "yes," is mankind responsible for a significant and noticeable portion of an increase in temperatures? Mankind is responsible for just a few percent of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are not responsible for most of what causes warming (e.g., the Sun). Over 100 leading climate scientists from around the world signed a letter in December stating: "significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming." In December a list was also released of another 400 scientists who questioned the general notion of significant manmade global warming. 3) If the answer to both preceding questions is "yes," is an increase temperature changes "bad"? That answer is hardly obvious. Higher temperatures could increase ocean levels by between seven inches and two feet over the next 100 years. Although some blame global warming for seemingly everything, according to others higher temperatures will increase the amount of land that we can use to grow food, it will improve people's health, and increase biological diversity. Even the UN says that a mild increase in temperature would be good for many regions of the globe. 4) Finally, let's assume that the answer to all three previous questions is "yes." Does that mean we need more regulations and taxes? No, that is still not clear....
Judge denies government bid to back out of sage grouse agreement A federal judge is holding the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to an agreement reached with environmentalists that sets a timeline for deciding whether to give the sage grouse special protection. The wildlife agency sought to back out of a stipulation that would have required it to determine by May 2009 whether to declare the species threatened or endangered. Government attorneys asked a federal judge in Boise to void the deal because it had not been approved by top agency officials. U.S. District Judge B. Linn Winmill denied the request yesterday, ruling the agreement is legally binding. A decision to grant Endangered Species Act protections to the sage grouse could affect energy development and urban growth across the West. Sage grouse habitat stretches across 11 Western states from California to North Dakota....
EPA approves Montana water standards The federal government has approved strict new water quality standards sought by Montana over fears that coal-bed methane drilling in neighboring Wyoming could pollute interstate rivers. Montana officials said Monday that the new rules would protect farmers from poor-quality water produced during exploration for coal-bed methane. Over the last decade, that industry has boomed just over the state line in Wyoming. "It's a good thing to protect the water for our state," Montana Department of Environmental Quality Director Richard Opper said of the new rules. They were approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in a letter dated Friday. But with a federal lawsuit over the issue still pending before District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Cheyenne, it was not immediately clear how far Montana could go in enforcing the standards. The energy industry and state of Wyoming joined forces to oppose the rules in court after they were adopted by Montana's Board of Environmental Quality in 2006. They argued Montana's actions threaten to dampen energy development in the Powder River Basin, which straddles the border of the two states....
Utah's national parks may soon allow firearms Visitors to Utah's national parks may soon be able to carry loaded firearms, despite the concerns of conservation groups that armed tourists could lead to more poaching. Under pressure from gun rights groups and about half of the U.S. Senate, the Interior Department has agreed to rewrite its regulations to comply with state laws. Utah, like much of the West, allows guns in state parks. So the change would make it legal for those traveling through Arches or Zions to take along a loaded gun. The current regulations require visitors to keep their guns unloaded and stowed. Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett joined 45 other colleagues, most of whom are Republicans, in asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to make the change. The Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service rules allow loaded guns, while the National Parks and U.S. Fish and Wildlife do not....
Don’t starve the Forest Service A whole lot of Rocky Mountain Westerners are concerned about President Bush’s recent proposal to cut the U.S. Forest Service budget. Out our way, the land is not an abstraction. The numbers in the Forest Service budget aren’t abstractions, either. They mean something real to our land and to our lives, and a cut of up to 2,700 people in an already beleaguered and understaffed agency is genuine cause for alarm. Now, the president’s proposed budget for 2009 asks this overworked agency to do even more with far less. It would allocate $4.1 billion to the agency -- $373 million less than this year’s budget and an 8 percent cut. This is senseless. Bush’s notion of slashing 17 percent from trail maintenance and $13 million from fuels reduction is both foolish and dangerous. By birthright, each of us has a stake in the Western lands, whether it’s 87 percent of Nevada or 28 percent of Montana. All told, an average of more than 50 percent of the land in these eight Western states is commonly owned, with Forest Service employees acting as our caretakers....
Charges filed in Quad accident The fact that no one was hurt in the accident is still on the minds of the locals. But some other issues are now being discovered. Craig Trinkle of the U.S. Forest Service is now being accused of driving under the influence when the accident occurred at the 25th running of the Mount Taylor Winter Quadrathlon. According to a criminal complaint filed in Cibola County Magistrate Court on Feb. 25, Trinkle is charged with operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor or drugs. Trinkle was found to have alcohol, marijuana and several prescribed medications in his system at the time of the accident, according to a report filed by the New Mexico State Police. “We will just have to wait and see how that all ends up in court,” said District Ranger Chuck Hagerdon of the USFS. He added that Trinkle remains on medical leave. Hagerdon added that his office would be conducting its own review of the incident. Twenty three bicycles owned by competitors at the annual event were damaged in the accident when the vehicle plowed into them. The chaos ended when a large tree stopped the green truck that narrowly missed volunteers and crashed through bleachers....
Western Watersheds sues BLM over grazing, fence building Hailey-based environmental group Western Watersheds Project has sued the Bureau of Land Management, alleging the agency violated a 2005 settlement by authorizing reconstruction on 500,000 acres of federal land burned in last year's Murphy Complex Fire. The group wants a judge to block the agency from building fences and allowing livestock to graze on the habitat of sage grouse and pygmy rabbit - species under consideration for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. District Court documents, filed Monday in Boise, ask a judge to halt fence construction in an area managed by the agency's Jarbidge Field Office near Three Creek. The group also wants the court to prohibit livestock grazing on 20 allotments covered in the 2005 court-stipulated settlement and to block grazing on an additional 36 allotments until the agency prepares an environmental impact statement. Since the July fire, which burned 650,000 acres and destroyed more than 70 prime sage grouse breeding grounds, the agency has worked to rebuild 99 miles of burned fence, remove 12 miles of hazardous trees and plant more than 1,600 shrubs at a cost of about $25 million. The agency has authorized additional grazing in unburned areas and an additional 400 miles of fence repair while ignoring impacts to wildlife, Western Watersheds alleges....
The 'Pig Czar' Maj. Bobby Toon is known as the Pig Czar at the huge army post on Georgia's western edge. He has been assigned to help rid Fort Benning of its unwanted guests: an estimated 6,000 feral pigs that roam the 184,000-acre installation. The animals, common throughout Georgia, are known for tearing up woodlands and farms. They are aggressive foragers, gobbling up native vegetation and endangered species. "These pigs feed and breed," Toon said. "That's all they care about. I've been here off and on for 17 years, and I can never remember a pig population as big as it is now." Since July, more than 900 pigs have been killed. "These animals can smell a turkey egg three miles away," Toon said. "They're also a danger to tortoises and woodpeckers." About 2,000 people who are authorized to hunt on the post have been encouraged to go after the feral pigs. They must be active-duty, retired military or civilian workers at Benning and must have a license from the base. The post is offering a $40 bounty for every pig tail that's brought in....
Luxury Homes Burn in Apparent Eco-Attack Three seven-figure dream homes went up in flames early Monday in a Seattle suburb, apparently set by eco-terrorists who left a sign mocking the builders' claims that the 4,000-plus-square-foot houses were environmentally friendly. The sign — a sheet marked with spray paint — bore the initials ELF, for Earth Liberation Front, a loose collection of radical environmentalists that has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks since the 1990s. The sheriff's office estimated that Monday's pre-dawn fires did $7 million in damage to the "Street of Dreams," a row of unoccupied, furnished luxury model homes where tens of thousands of visitors last summer eyed the latest in high-end housing, interior design and landscaping. Three homes were destroyed and two suffered smoke damage. The FBI was investigating the fires as a potential domestic terrorism act, said FBI spokesman Rich Kolko in Washington, D.C....
On the Earth Liberation Front Arson is a strange way to defend the Earth. The hardcore environmental activists behind the Earth Liberation Front disagree. According to the Associated Press, the group has previously taken credit (if it can be called that) for several arsons in the northwest of the United States. They've attacked U.S. Forest Service buildings and a Colorado ski resort, the latter assault doing US$12-million in damage. In one case, the ELF burned down a horticulture building at the University of Washington because they were angry that researchers therein were genetically engineering trees. Actually, researchers weren't doing anything of the sort in the building. They were too busy preserving endangered plants and restoring wetlands. But by the time someone told the ELF that, it had already done about US$7-million of damage. The genetically-engineered poplars that the ELF was so exercised about were actually housed in a separate building that was untouched by the attack. Now, separate fires in 4 luxury show homes in a Seattle suburb look like the ELF's latest handiwork. (A sign bearing the initials "ELF" and complaining "Built Green? Nope black!" was left on the scene.)....
New houses becoming popular targets The Earth Liberation Front has its roots in the militant opposition to logging of old-growth forests. Beginning in 1996, an underground group launched more than a dozen arsons against targets that included the U.S. Forest Service, timber companies, a horse slaughterhouse, a car dealership and a University of Washington researcher believed to be genetically engineering poplar trees. But in recent years, new housing developments popping up on the urban fringes have become the most high-profile targets claimed by the ELF. Those attacks include a 2002 arson that destroyed a San Diego apartment complex and caused $50 million in damage, and a 2000 torching of a luxury housing development in Mount Sinai, N.Y. "If you build it, we will burn it," was the graffiti left at the scene of the New York fire, according to The New York Times....
NYT Term for Eco-Terrorists: 'Anti-Sprawl Activists' Opening paragraph from the New York Times article on the eco-terrorists who burned three new homes north of Seattle today [emphasis added]: For people who are anti-sprawl activists — or have baser motives — a new-built house sitting empty in a previously rural area evidently makes a ripe target for an attack by fire. Consider also the article's headline "House Fires With a Message in the Northwest." Yes, think of it as a bonus. Not just a housefire . . . a housefire with a message!
Environmental activist pleads not guilty Three days after his extradition from Canada, environmental activist and ex-fugitive Tre Arrow pleaded not guilty to arson and conspiracy charges in federal court Monday and was ordered held as a flight risk and public danger pending trial. Arrow, 34, who has legally changed his name from Michael Scarpitti, is charged in a 14-count federal indictment with helping to destroy concrete-mixing trucks at Ross Island Sand and Gravel Company in Portland in April 2001 and of firebombing logging trucks at Schoppert Logging Co. in Eagle Creek near Mount Hood in June 2001. He was returned to Portland Friday after fighting extradition for four years from a prison in British Columbia. Before his arrest in Canada, he was a fugitive from the FBI for 19 months. Dressed in a blue prison uniform, Arrow clasped his hands together, smiled and bowed in the courtroom as he was led to the defense table. He did not speak during the brief arraignment. U.S. District Judge Paul Hubel ordered him held pending a possible detention hearing. Through his attorney Paul Loney, Arrow requested that he be given a raw vegan diet in accordance with his religious beliefs, and a court official said that probably could be accommodated. Hubel asked that it be done as quickly as possible....
Are Wolves The Pronghorn's Best Friend? As western states debate removing the gray wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act, a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society cautions that doing so may result in an unintended decline in another species: the pronghorn, a uniquely North American animal that resembles an African antelope. The study, appearing in the latest issue of the journal Ecology, says that fewer wolves mean more coyotes, which can prey heavily on pronghorn fawns if the delicate balance between predators and their prey is altered. According to the study, healthy wolf packs keep coyote numbers in check, while rarely feeding on pronghorn fawns themselves. As a result, fawns have higher survival rates when wolves are present in an ecosystem. Over a three-year period, researchers radio-collared more than 100 fawns in wolf-free and wolf-abundant areas of Grand Teton National Park and monitored their survival throughout the summer. The results showed that only 10 percent of fawns survived in areas lacking wolves, but where coyote densities were higher. In areas where wolves were abundant, 34 percent of pronghorn fawns survived. Wolves reduce coyote numbers by killing them outright or by causing them to shift to safer areas of the Park not utilized by wolves....
Annual drilling restrictions take effect in Wyoming Annual restrictions that ban most energy-related activities within two miles of active sage grouse breeding areas on federal land are now in effect for the next three and a half months in Wyoming. Last Saturday marked the first day of the restrictions. The federal regulations hit Campbell County especially hard last year and are expected to have a significant impact this year. State and private lands where the regulations do not apply are increasingly drilled out, forcing coal-bed methane companies onto more federal land. In addition, last week, a federal judge decided to hold the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to a May 2009 deadline to decide whether to list the sage grouse as an endangered species, ignoring the service's request for an extension of the deadline. The decision will also require the service to do a new report on the bird, and give the public 60 days to comment on that report. The report is due in November....
BLM report says drilling would boost gas leakage A court challenge to increased coal-bed methane development on the Atlantic Rim has yielded a document that contradicts the Bureau of Land Management's public position on whether new drilling will cause more gas seepage from the ground. Erik Molvar, wildlife biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, said court records resulting from a lawsuit filed by his organization and four other groups contains a document from the BLM about how drilling has boosted the number of methane gas seeps on the Atlantic Rim. The lawsuit was filed after the BLM approved a 2,000-well project on Atlantic Rim, on the eastern edge of the Red Desert in southern Wyoming. The BLM document, prepared by a petroleum engineer, states that when BLM officials toured the area, they found the level of activity at known methane gas seep sites had "increased dramatically since the commencement of coal-bed methane" development "in the immediate vicinity." BLM officials and others who have looked at the methane seeps agree that some seeps have been in the area for years. Dispute centers on the recent increased activity witnessed at those seeps....
Conflict seen in smelt rules Water users who benefit most from tapping the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have been given an unprecedented role in drafting new rules to manage water diversions. Critics call it a "fox in the henhouse" situation that may further imperil the Delta, where experts believe water diversions have already contributed to a broad ecosystem collapse. The new draft rules, called a biological assessment, are being prepared in response to a court order last year. Federal Judge Oliver Wanger in Fresno declared existing rules inadequate to protect the threatened Delta smelt. He set a Sept. 12 deadline to rewrite the rules. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates one of two Delta water systems, is a defendant in the case. The bureau allowed water contractors to help write new diversion rules. Wanger, in his ruling, didn't specify who should rewrite the rules. The decision also applies to its co-defendant, the state Department of Water Resources, which operates the other diversion system, and its contractors....
Eminent domain hovers over Monument woman's property For 30 years, Georgia Ward has lived on 40 picturesque acres south of town, the perfect place for horses to roam and graze and drink from Monument Creek. But a Monument road could one day run through Ward’s land, dividing it in two and leaving the eastern two-thirds of it cut off and useless, Ward said. “Who would ever want it then?” Ward said last week. The town wants to connect Mitchell Road, which dead-ends at the south end of town, to Forest Lakes Boulevard, which curves north from Baptist Road west of Interstate 25. To make way for the road, the town plans to use eminent domain to seize an 80-foot-wide strip of land crossing Ward’s property. Eminent domain is a touchy subject among northern El Paso County landowners after the Lewis-Palmer School District in 2006 raised the specter of condemnation to obtain land for a new high school. The school district backed down in the face of fierce protests that included a threatened recall when the descendants of the pioneer family who still lived on the Wissler Ranch went public that they were being pressured to sell....
No Global Warming Crisis To see if all this makes any sense there are really four questions that all have to be answered "yes." 1) Are global temperatures rising? Surely, they were rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but "there has been no net global warming since 1998." Indeed, the more recent numbers show that there is now evidence of significant cooling. 2) But supposing that the answer to the first question is "yes," is mankind responsible for a significant and noticeable portion of an increase in temperatures? Mankind is responsible for just a few percent of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases are not responsible for most of what causes warming (e.g., the Sun). Over 100 leading climate scientists from around the world signed a letter in December stating: "significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming." In December a list was also released of another 400 scientists who questioned the general notion of significant manmade global warming. 3) If the answer to both preceding questions is "yes," is an increase temperature changes "bad"? That answer is hardly obvious. Higher temperatures could increase ocean levels by between seven inches and two feet over the next 100 years. Although some blame global warming for seemingly everything, according to others higher temperatures will increase the amount of land that we can use to grow food, it will improve people's health, and increase biological diversity. Even the UN says that a mild increase in temperature would be good for many regions of the globe. 4) Finally, let's assume that the answer to all three previous questions is "yes." Does that mean we need more regulations and taxes? No, that is still not clear....
Judge denies government bid to back out of sage grouse agreement A federal judge is holding the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to an agreement reached with environmentalists that sets a timeline for deciding whether to give the sage grouse special protection. The wildlife agency sought to back out of a stipulation that would have required it to determine by May 2009 whether to declare the species threatened or endangered. Government attorneys asked a federal judge in Boise to void the deal because it had not been approved by top agency officials. U.S. District Judge B. Linn Winmill denied the request yesterday, ruling the agreement is legally binding. A decision to grant Endangered Species Act protections to the sage grouse could affect energy development and urban growth across the West. Sage grouse habitat stretches across 11 Western states from California to North Dakota....
EPA approves Montana water standards The federal government has approved strict new water quality standards sought by Montana over fears that coal-bed methane drilling in neighboring Wyoming could pollute interstate rivers. Montana officials said Monday that the new rules would protect farmers from poor-quality water produced during exploration for coal-bed methane. Over the last decade, that industry has boomed just over the state line in Wyoming. "It's a good thing to protect the water for our state," Montana Department of Environmental Quality Director Richard Opper said of the new rules. They were approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in a letter dated Friday. But with a federal lawsuit over the issue still pending before District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Cheyenne, it was not immediately clear how far Montana could go in enforcing the standards. The energy industry and state of Wyoming joined forces to oppose the rules in court after they were adopted by Montana's Board of Environmental Quality in 2006. They argued Montana's actions threaten to dampen energy development in the Powder River Basin, which straddles the border of the two states....
Utah's national parks may soon allow firearms Visitors to Utah's national parks may soon be able to carry loaded firearms, despite the concerns of conservation groups that armed tourists could lead to more poaching. Under pressure from gun rights groups and about half of the U.S. Senate, the Interior Department has agreed to rewrite its regulations to comply with state laws. Utah, like much of the West, allows guns in state parks. So the change would make it legal for those traveling through Arches or Zions to take along a loaded gun. The current regulations require visitors to keep their guns unloaded and stowed. Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett joined 45 other colleagues, most of whom are Republicans, in asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to make the change. The Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service rules allow loaded guns, while the National Parks and U.S. Fish and Wildlife do not....
Don’t starve the Forest Service A whole lot of Rocky Mountain Westerners are concerned about President Bush’s recent proposal to cut the U.S. Forest Service budget. Out our way, the land is not an abstraction. The numbers in the Forest Service budget aren’t abstractions, either. They mean something real to our land and to our lives, and a cut of up to 2,700 people in an already beleaguered and understaffed agency is genuine cause for alarm. Now, the president’s proposed budget for 2009 asks this overworked agency to do even more with far less. It would allocate $4.1 billion to the agency -- $373 million less than this year’s budget and an 8 percent cut. This is senseless. Bush’s notion of slashing 17 percent from trail maintenance and $13 million from fuels reduction is both foolish and dangerous. By birthright, each of us has a stake in the Western lands, whether it’s 87 percent of Nevada or 28 percent of Montana. All told, an average of more than 50 percent of the land in these eight Western states is commonly owned, with Forest Service employees acting as our caretakers....
Charges filed in Quad accident The fact that no one was hurt in the accident is still on the minds of the locals. But some other issues are now being discovered. Craig Trinkle of the U.S. Forest Service is now being accused of driving under the influence when the accident occurred at the 25th running of the Mount Taylor Winter Quadrathlon. According to a criminal complaint filed in Cibola County Magistrate Court on Feb. 25, Trinkle is charged with operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor or drugs. Trinkle was found to have alcohol, marijuana and several prescribed medications in his system at the time of the accident, according to a report filed by the New Mexico State Police. “We will just have to wait and see how that all ends up in court,” said District Ranger Chuck Hagerdon of the USFS. He added that Trinkle remains on medical leave. Hagerdon added that his office would be conducting its own review of the incident. Twenty three bicycles owned by competitors at the annual event were damaged in the accident when the vehicle plowed into them. The chaos ended when a large tree stopped the green truck that narrowly missed volunteers and crashed through bleachers....
Western Watersheds sues BLM over grazing, fence building Hailey-based environmental group Western Watersheds Project has sued the Bureau of Land Management, alleging the agency violated a 2005 settlement by authorizing reconstruction on 500,000 acres of federal land burned in last year's Murphy Complex Fire. The group wants a judge to block the agency from building fences and allowing livestock to graze on the habitat of sage grouse and pygmy rabbit - species under consideration for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. District Court documents, filed Monday in Boise, ask a judge to halt fence construction in an area managed by the agency's Jarbidge Field Office near Three Creek. The group also wants the court to prohibit livestock grazing on 20 allotments covered in the 2005 court-stipulated settlement and to block grazing on an additional 36 allotments until the agency prepares an environmental impact statement. Since the July fire, which burned 650,000 acres and destroyed more than 70 prime sage grouse breeding grounds, the agency has worked to rebuild 99 miles of burned fence, remove 12 miles of hazardous trees and plant more than 1,600 shrubs at a cost of about $25 million. The agency has authorized additional grazing in unburned areas and an additional 400 miles of fence repair while ignoring impacts to wildlife, Western Watersheds alleges....
The 'Pig Czar' Maj. Bobby Toon is known as the Pig Czar at the huge army post on Georgia's western edge. He has been assigned to help rid Fort Benning of its unwanted guests: an estimated 6,000 feral pigs that roam the 184,000-acre installation. The animals, common throughout Georgia, are known for tearing up woodlands and farms. They are aggressive foragers, gobbling up native vegetation and endangered species. "These pigs feed and breed," Toon said. "That's all they care about. I've been here off and on for 17 years, and I can never remember a pig population as big as it is now." Since July, more than 900 pigs have been killed. "These animals can smell a turkey egg three miles away," Toon said. "They're also a danger to tortoises and woodpeckers." About 2,000 people who are authorized to hunt on the post have been encouraged to go after the feral pigs. They must be active-duty, retired military or civilian workers at Benning and must have a license from the base. The post is offering a $40 bounty for every pig tail that's brought in....
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