Seventy-five family farmers, seed businesses, and agricultural organizations representing over 300,000 individuals and 4,500 farms filed a brief Thursday, July 5 with the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C. asking the appellate court to reverse a lower court’s decision from February dismissing their protective legal action against agricultural giant Monsanto’s patents on genetically engineered seed.
The plaintiffs brought the pre-emptive case against Monsanto in March 2011 in the Southern District of New York and specifically seek to defend themselves from nearly two dozen of Monsanto’s most aggressively asserted patents on GMO seed. They were forced to act pre-emptively to protect themselves from Monsanto’s abusive lawsuits, fearing that if GMO seed contaminates their property despite their efforts to prevent such contamination, Monsanto will sue them for patent infringement.
“It’s time to end Monsanto’s scorched earth legal campaign of threats and intimidation against America’s farmers. Family farmers should be protected by the courts against the unwanted genetic contamination of their crops,” said Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!, a grassroots community of more than 300,000 farmers and citizens dedicated to reforming food and agriculture, that is co-plaintiff in the suit.
In an attempt to sidestep the challenge, Monsanto moved to have the case dismissed, saying that the plaintiffs’ concerns were unrealistic. In February 2012, the district court took Monsanto’s side and dismissed the case, ridiculing the farmers in the process. Despite the fact that the plaintiffs are at risk for being contaminated by genetically modified seed and then sued for patent infringement by Monsanto, Judge Naomi Buchwald of the Southern District of New York dismissed the case because she didn’t find a case worthy of adjudication, saying “it is clear that these circumstances do not amount to a substantial controversy and that there has been no injury traceable to defendants.”
Every year Monsanto investigates over 500 farmers for patent infringement with their now notorious “seed police”. To date, 144 farmers have had lawsuits brought against them by Monsanto without a binding contract with the multinational corporation, while another 700 farmers have been forced to settle out of court for undisclosed sums.
“Monsanto is known for bullying farmers by making baseless accusations of patent infringement,” said attorney Dan Ravicher of the not-for-profit legal services organization Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), which represents the plaintiffs in the suit against Monsanto known as Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association et al. v Monsanto. “They’ve sued and harassed many other farmers who wanted nothing to do with their genetically modified seed and now that organic and conventional farmers are fighting back, they claim they would never do such a thing without backing up their words with an enforceable promise.”
Nature has determined that seed and pollen can drift great distances, in some cases as far as 10-15 miles, increasing the likelihood of contamination of organic crops with genetics from Monsanto’s laboratories. These seeds and crops are referred to as “transgenic” seed that has had DNA of foreign organisms inserted into its DNA through human engineered processes. Plaintiffs use and sell nontransgenic seed, more commonly referred to as heirloom, organic, or conventional seed.
“We have a right to farm the way we choose,” said Maine organic seed farmer Jim Gerritsen, President of lead plaintiff Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA). “Yet Monsanto is unwilling to control their GMO pollution and they refuse to sign a binding covenant not-to-sue our family farmers for patent infringement should their seed contaminate our crops. Monsanto’s publicized ‘Commitment’ promising that they would not sue farmers was described by Monsanto’s own lawyers as being ‘vague.’ The law says we deserve protection under the Declaratory Judgment Act. We will continue to pursue our right to farm, and the right of our customers to have access to good clean food and seed.”
British Airways today faced a backlash from privacy campaigners after it revealed plans to use the internet to create “dossiers” on passengers.
The airline said it wanted to be able to deliver a more personal touch by researching passengers. The “Know Me” programme will use Google images to find pictures of passengers so that staff can approach them as they arrive at the terminal or plane.
BA staff will also search individual data held by the airline, including if a regular traveller has experienced problems on previous flights, such as delays, so that crew are primed to apologise.
Jo Boswell, head of customer analysis at BA, said: “We’re essentially trying to recreate the feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant when you’re welcomed there, but in our case it will be delivered by thousands of staff to millions of customers. This is just the start — the system has a myriad of possibilities for the future.”
A BA spokesman added: “The most recent advancement of the system enables the British Airways team to search Google images for a photo of specific customers so they can recognise them and proactively approach them. The airline is aiming to send 4,500 personal recognition messages a day by the end of the year.”
But Nick Pickles, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “Since when has buying a flight ticket meant giving your airline permission to start hunting for information about you on the internet?
“If British Airways want more information about us they can ask us for it, rather than ignoring people’s privacy and storing data without us having any idea what data they are storing.”
BA has a mixed reputation for on-board customer service. US reality TV star Kim Kardashian accused BA staff of taking “irreplaceable” handbags and sunglasses from her cases.
BA’s biggest rival, Virgin Atlantic, also faced complaints over privacy after it was alleged that one of its employees had leaked celebrities’ flight details to a paparazzi agency.
A spokesman for British Airways responded: “We are entirely compliant with the UK data protection act and would never breach that. Know Me is simply another tool to enable us to offer good customer service, similar to the recognition that high street loyalty scheme members expect.
“The Google Images search app helps our customer service team to recognise high profile travellers such as captains of industry who would be using our First class facilities enabling us to give a more personalised service.”
Hollywood film industry bosses are dismissing claims they pressured the US Government to shut down Kim Dotcom’s internet filesharing site Megaupload.
Publicly released White House logs show meetings between studio executives and US Vice President Joe Biden about six months before the January raids that saw Dotcom and three Megaupload colleagues arrested and facing the threat of extradition.
“I do know from a credible source that it was Joe Biden, the best friend of former Senator and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Chris Dodd, who ordered his former lawyer and now state attorney Neil MacBride to take Mega down,” Dotcom told the TorrentFreak website.
“It is interesting that a man by the name of Mike Ellis of MPA Asia, an extradition expert and former superintendent of the Hong Kong police, was also at a meeting with Dodd, all studio bosses and Joe Biden. The same Mike Ellis met with the Minister of Justice Simon Power in New Zealand.”
However, in a statement to technology media website Cnet, the MPAA said Megaupload wasn’t even discussed in the meeting.
“The purpose of this meeting with the vice president was to discuss his [then] upcoming trip to China last August and the importance of reaching a settlement, with the Chinese Government, of the United States World Trade Organisation complaint against China, which would increase the number of foreign films permitted into that country and provide a better share of box office revenues,” the statement said.
“The eventual agreement announced in February was a major step forward in spurring the growth of U.S. exports to China and was tremendous news for the millions of American workers and businesses whose jobs depend on the entertainment industry.”
In a High Court decision released last week, Justice Helen Winkelmann found that search warrants used in the raid on Dotcom’s $30 million Auckland mansion were invalid because they did not adequately describe the allegations against him.
Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested after the FBI asked for help.
US officials claim the men were behind the world’s biggest criminal copyright violation through Megaupload, which carried about 4 per cent of the world’s internet traffic. The men deny the charges.
Privacy advocates this week said they are dismayed, but not surprised about a New York Criminal Court judge’s decision ordering Twitter to hand over all the data it has on an Occupy Wall Street protester being investigated for disorderly conduct.
In an 11-page ruling, Judge Matthew Sciarrino denied Twitter’s motion to quash a subpoena from New York City prosecutors seeking the deleted tweets, email addresses, IP address and other information of Twitter user Malcolm Harris, who was arrested last year in connection with the New York OWS protests.
The ruling marked the second time the same court has rejected arguments that the data being sought by prosecutors is constitutionally protected and can only be obtained via a search warrant. Harris had earlier sought to quash the subpoena.
The court rejected Harris’ claims because the data sought by prosecutors belonged to Twitter, not him. The court asserted that Harris therefore had no standing to challenge the subpoena.
In filing its motion to quash the subpoena, Twitter contended that under its terms of service, the data belonged to Harris.
Twitter argued that taking away Harris’ ability to challenge the subpoena unfairly puts the onus on Twitter to legally defend its users rights.
Twitter and Harris both contended the data being sought was protected under Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure. Thus, Twitter maintained that prosecutors needed to obtain a search warrant before they could ask for the data to be handed over.
In dismissing the arguments, Judge Sciarrino held that the Fourth Amendment didn’t apply in this case because there would be no physical intrusion into Harris’ Twitter account.
“If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to the world,” he wrote.
Tweeting is very different from a private mail, private chat or other forms of private online communications, Sciarrino wrote.
“Those private dialogues would require a warrant based on probable cause in order to access the relevant information. ” The same is not true of public tweets, he noted.
The ruling elicited predictable groans from privacy rights groups. “We think the judge missed the point on the privacy analysis,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
“It’s one thing for the police to overhear a person shout an incriminating statement. We agree there would be no expectation of privacy” in those situations, Rotenberg said. “But when the police go to a communications service provider and demand that the company turn over records of a customer, that is a very different scenario.”
In an amicus brief filed with the court, EPIC and other groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that prosecutors were not asking just for the content of Harris’ tweets — the subpoena also sought the date, time, and IP address Harris used each time he logged into his Twitter account over a three-month period.
The privacy groups contended that seeking such information without a warrant is a violation of Harris’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.
The judge’s decision to order Twitter to hand over the information is a dissappointment, said EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury in a blog post Wednesday.
“While we’re not surprised the judge didn’t change his mind, we’re still disappointed to see the court failing to appreciate the privacy concerns at stake.” Fakhoury said. “We think the court is behind the times on this important issue.”
Chris Hoofnagle, director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said that courts, in general, have been unwilling to burden criminal procedure with First Amendment speech issues.
“I did not find the outcome surprising,” Hoofnagle said. “Criminal investigation routinely involves records that are revealing of speech and associational activity. “
Behnam Dayanim, an attorney with Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider’s litigation and regulatory group said that the verdict came as no surprise to him for different reasons.
“To me, the proposition that just because a tweet might be considered property of Twitter it is therefore protected under the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment, is a stretch,” Dayanim said. “Just because something is property of your doesn’t mean that the government isn’t entitled to obtain it through a court ordered subpoena,” he said.
Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan, send e-mail to jvijayan@computerworld.com or subscribe to Jaikumar’s RSS feed .
Bulgaria’s parliament passed a new waste management law Thursday meant to bring the country into line with European Union rules and avoid the looming threat of non-compliance fines.
The law had been stalled in parliament for a year because of strong opposition from recycled metal dealers.
Bulgaria has more than 2,000 scrap-metal buyers who are rarely forced to show the required “certificate of origin” for their wares — enabling a thriving trade in stolen rails, road signs and electric lines.
Local media often carry reports of youths, mainly Roma, who die stealing high-voltage power lines.
Under the new law, recycled metal dealers must apply for new licenses and set up shop in locations authorized and monitored by local authorities. Only electronic payment will be allowed.
The law also requires towns to recycle at least 50 percent of household waste by 2020, a big change for a country that recycles little of its rubbish other than metals.
Environment Minister Nona Karadjova said she was confident the law would allow Bulgaria to escape European Commission fines despite being adopted well after the EU’s December 2010 deadline for countries to comply with new waste management regulations.
The EU rules require countries to legislate regulations such as the “polluter pays” principle and implement policies to reduce, reuse and recycle much of their waste.
An experimental once-daily pill that combines four drugs to fight HIV is as safe and effective as commonly-prescribed treatments against the AIDS virus, researchers reported in The Lancet Friday.
Doctors tested the new drug, called Quad, for the third and final phase in which new pharmaceutical products are vetted for safety and effectiveness.
Publication in the British journal follows a recommendation in May by a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel to approve Quad for previously untreated adults infected with HIV-1. A final decision is expected by August.
The first trial entailed testing Quad against a three-in-one pill, Atripla, which since 2006 has been a standard treatment for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Researchers enrolled 700 patients in centres in North America and assigned them randomly to either Quad or Atripla.
After 48 weeks of treatment, 88 percent of Quad patients had suppressed viral loads to below detectable levels, against 84 percent in the Atripla group.
Side effects were infrequent but similar in both groups. Among Quad patients, mild nausea was the more common adverse event, whereas with Atripla, symptoms were likelier to be dizziness, abnormal dreams or insomnia and skin rashes.
In the second trial, 708 patients were enrolled in Australia, Europe, North America and Europe.
Patients were either given Quad or a widely recommended therapy comprising the molecules atazanavir (ATV), boosted by ritonavir (RTV), together with emtricitabine (FTC) and tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, or TDF.
After 48 weeks, 90 percent of the Quad group had viral levels below detectable levels compared to 87 percent in the other drug group.
Only 3.7 percent of patients in the Quad group stopped treatment because of side effects, compared with 5.1 percent in the other group. On the other hand, the number who reported kidney complications in the Quad group was relatively higher.
Quad comprises FTC and TDF, along with a drug called elvitegravir (ETV), which is designed to inhibit HIV replication. The fourth ingredient is a “pharmacoenhancer” called cobicistat to boost the effectiveness of ETV.
The movement towards a single once-daily pill to suppress HIV has a huge benefit for patients, say AIDS researchers.
When the first antiretroviral drugs emerged in the 1990s, patients had to take a dozen tablets a day or more, a “pill burden” that meant many forgot to follow the entire treatment.
“Patient adherence to medication is vital, especially for patients with HIV, where missed doses can quickly lead to the virus becoming resistant,” said Paul Sax of Harvard Medical School, who led the first study in Friday’s Lancet.
“Our results provide an additional highly potent, well-tolerated treatment option, and highlight the simplicity of treatment resulting from combining several antiretrovirals in single pill.”
Quad is made by the US pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences, which also funded the trials, a practice that is relatively common in drug development.
Clinical tests for new drugs have to go through a three-phase process that is scrutinised by independent assessors and government regulators for safety and objectivity. Publication of the research in a peer-reviewed journal is a final step in the procedure.
As many as 300,000 PCs and Macs will drop off the Internet in about 65 hours unless their owners heed last-minute calls to scrub their machines of malware.
According to a group of security experts formed to combat DNSChanger, between a quarter-million and 300,000 computers, perhaps many more, were still infected as of July 2.
DNSChanger hijacked users’ clicks by modifying their computers’ domain name system (DNS) settings to send URL requests to the criminals’ own servers, a tactic that shunted victims to hacker-created sites that resembled real domains.
At one point, as many as 4 million PCs and Macs were infected with the malware, which earned its makers $14 million, U.S. federal authorities have said.
Infected machines will lose their link to the Internet at 12:01 a.m. ET Monday, July 9, when replacement DNS servers go dark.
The servers, which have been maintained under a federal court order by Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), the non-profit group that maintains the popular BIND DNS open-source software, were deployed last year after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized more than 100 command-and-control (C&C) systems during the take-down of the hacker gang responsible for DNSChanger.
The FBI’s “Operation Ghost Click” ended with arrests of six Estonian men — a seventh, a Russian, remains at large — the C&C seizures, and the substitution of the replacement servers. Without the substitutes, DNSChanger-infected systems would have been immediately knocked off the Internet.
It’s not just consumer PCs and Macs — DNSChanger was equal-opportunity malware — that remain infected, but also corporate computers and systems at government agencies, said Tacoma, Wash.-based Internet Identity (IID), which has been monitoring cleanup efforts.
Last week, IID said that its scans showed 12% of Fortune 500 firms, or about one out of every eight, harbored DNSChanger-compromised computers or routers. And two out of 55 scanned U.S. government departments or agencies — or 3.6% — also had failed to scrub all their PCs and Macs.
The newest numbers were down from earlier scans by IID. In March, for example, the company pegged the Fortune 500 DNSChanger infection rate at 19% and the government agency rate at 9%.
But there are still tens of thousands of laggards who have not cleaned their computers, even after a months-long effort by the DNSChanger Working Group (DCWG), a volunteer organization of security professionals and companies.
“We’re all struggling with this,” said Rod Rasmussen, chief technology officer of IID and a member of the DCWG. “There are a lot of people who just haven’t gotten the word.”
The cleanup, Rasmussen said, has been the tough part of the DNSChanger takedown.
“There was a lot of planning done for the initial takedown, the arrests, the swapping of servers, but there wasn’t as much for after the take-down,” said Rasmussen. “How do we clean things up? Victim remediation is a challenge for our industry. Everyone wants to do it, but how do you pay for it?”
The DCWG worked extensively with ISPs (Internet service providers) to help them alert customers with infected computers — identified by their being shuttled through the replacement servers — and advise them on removing the malware. The group also reached out to enterprises, government agencies and other organizations to offer the same assistance.
At times, that worked.
“Some ISPs have been very draconian,” said Rasmussen, citing providers that repeatedly called, emailed or phoned members with infected computers. “Some worked hard at a fair amount of expense.”
Others instead prepared for the support calls they expect to field starting Monday when startled customers realize they can’t get online. “They’re staffing up for [Monday], they know that they’re going to get [a large number of calls].”
For those that have done nothing, Monday will be rough, Rasmussen predicted. “For some ISPs, this may be a real flap,” he said.
But the project was sometimes frustrating.
One company, which Rasmussen would not name, had cleaned all its machines of DNSChanger, but was repeatedly re-infected. Finally, the firm discovered that laptops connecting to its public Wi-Fi network were spreading the malware, and even narrowed the list of suspects to the media because the timing of the re-infections coincided with press events the corporation held on its campus.
Even so, the effort has been worthwhile, not simply to ameliorate the impact, but as a learning experience for future such takedowns, or of “sinkholing” botnets in general.
“What we need in the future is a real-time alerting capability,” said Rasmussen, and described a system that would immediately notify a user if his or her computer had been shunted to a substitute server. The idea was discussed by the DCWG, but never implemented because it would have required much more hardware and support than was available.
“Someone has to support this volunteer effort,” said Rasmussen, who didn’t have an answer for where that support, whether financial or other resources, would come from.
Two of the Internet biggest companies have also pitched with their own anti-DNSChanger campaigns.
Users have access to several free tools that identify infected computers, including several that just debuted under the DCWG’s auspices. In the U.S., for example, users can steer to the dns-ok.us website. Other detection sites are listed on the DCWG’s domain.
But perhaps the loss of the Web is the only wake-up call some users will hear, Rasmussen said.
A few in the DCWG lobbied to stick to the original March 8 deadline and against an extension, believing that only a “tough love” approach would work, said Rasmussen.
“Some people haven’t been paying attention to the messages,” he said. “It’s not a lot, but they’re very reticent to do anything.”
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, send e-mail to gkeizer@ix.netcom.com or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed.
Pinyon pine forests near Los Alamos, N.M., had already begun to turn brown from drought stress in the image at left, in 2002, and another photo taken in 2004 from the same vantage point, at right, show them largely grey and dead. (Photo by Craig Allen, U.S. Geological Survey).
New research concludes that a one-two punch of drought and mountain pine beetle attacks are the primary forces that have killed more than 2.5 million acres of pinyon pine and juniper trees in the American Southwest during the past 15 years, setting the stage for further ecological disruption. The widespread dieback of these tree species is a special concern, scientists say, because they are some of the last trees that can hold together a fragile ecosystem, nourish other plant and animal species, and prevent serious soil erosion.
The major form of soil erosion in this region is wind erosion. Dust blowing from eroded hills can cover snowpacks, cause them to absorb heat from the sun and melt more quickly, and further reduce critically-short water supplies in the Colorado River basin.
The findings were published in the journal Ecohydrology by scientists from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University and the Conservation Biology Institute in Oregon. NASA supported the work.
“Pinyon pine and juniper are naturally drought-resistant, so when these tree species die from lack of water, it means something pretty serious is happening,” said Wendy Peterman, an OSU doctoral student and soil scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute. “They are the last bastion, the last trees standing and in some cases the only thing still holding soils in place.”
“These areas could ultimately turn from forests to grasslands, and in the meantime people are getting pretty desperate about these soil erosion issues,” she said. “And anything that further reduces flows in the Colorado River is also a significant concern.”
It’s not certain whether or not the recent tree die-offs are related to global warming, Peterman said. However, the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that while most of the United States was getting warmer and wetter, the Southwest will get warmer and drier.
Major droughts have in fact occurred there, and the loss of pinyon pine and juniper trees would be consistent with the climate change projections, Peterman said.
Pinyon pine and juniper are the dominant trees species in much of the Southwest, routinely able to withstand a year or two of drought, and able to grow in many mountainous areas at moderate elevation. The trees are common in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and may have expanded their range in the past century during conditions that were somewhat wetter than normal.
In some places up to 90 percent of these trees have now died, many of them during a major drought in 2003 and 2004. The new research concluded that most of the mortality occurred in shallow soils having less than four inches of available water in about the top five feet of the soil column.
Most of the tree mortality, the scientists said, was caused by trees being sufficiently weakened by drought that opportunistic bark beetle epidemics were able to kill the pinyon pine, and the vascular system of the juniper ceased to function.
Traditionally, pinyon pine and juniper were not considered trees of significant value. They were occasionally used for firewood, but otherwise small and not particularly impressive.
They perform key ecosystem functions, however, not the least of which is stabilizing soils and preventing erosion. They also provide some food in the form of pine nuts and juniper berries, and store carbon in their biomass, and in the soils beneath their canopies.
An Illinois beekeeper whose bee hives were stolen and allegedly destroyed by the Illinois Department of Agriculture has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his questions on why the state did this, and most importantly, what they did with his bees.
The state claims the bees were destroyed because they were infected with a disease called foulbrood.
But when the 58-year apiary keeper had his hearing—three weeks after the removal of his bees without his knowledge—the state’s “evidence” had disappeared, leaving more questions than answers about the raid on the beekeeper’s hives.
Some people, including the beekeeper, Terrence Ingram, suspect the raid has more to do with Ingram’s 15 years of research on Monsanto’s Roundup and his documented evidence that Roundup kills bees, than it does about any concerns about his hives.
Interestingly, the state’s theft targeted the queen bee and hive he’d been using to conduct the research.
The Ingram Case
A recent article by Tom Kocal in the Prairie Advocate retells the full story of how Terrence Ingram’s bees and hives wound up being taken by the Illinois State Department of Agriculture (IDofAG)i.
While the state claims the removal of the property was due to Ingram’s failure to comply with the Department’s notice instructing him to burn the affected hives, they have been less than open about why the inspectors came in and took the bees and hives without due process.
At a time when the Ingram’s were absent from the property. Ingram claims the Department also conducted three out of four inspections on his private property while no one was home.
While Department inspectors claim his hives had foulbrood—an allegedly highly contagious disease—Mr. Ingram believes he could prove that this was not the case. As reported by the featured Prairie Advocate article:
“Ingram knew that the inspectors could not tell what they were seeing and had warned the Department that if any of them came back it would be considered a criminal trespass. Yet they came back when he was not home, stole his hives and ruined his 15 years of research.”
Ingram initially reported the missing bees and hives as having been stolen on March 14, unaware that they’d been removed by the IDofAG. News of the theft was published in the Prairie Advocate on March 21.
As a result of that article, an area County Farm Bureau manager called the reporter, stating he knew the equipment hadn’t been stolen, but that it had been “destroyed” by the Department of Agriculture because they were infected with foulbrood and Ingram hadn’t disposed of them as instructed.
The most nonsensical part of this story is that Ingram didn’t get a hearing to determine whether his hives were affected by the disease until three weeks after they were removed and destroyed.
Kocal quotes Mr. Ingram as saying:
“I own four businesses. I am here all the time. Yet they took our bees and hives when we were not home. What did they do, sit up on the hill and watch until we left? We had not yet had our day in court to prove that our hives did not have foulbrood!”
Making matters worse, during that April 4 hearing, the Department couldn’t produce any evidence of what they’d done with the bees and the hives. Meanwhile, Ingram ended up being ordered to pay the $500 fine for violating Sections 2-1 of the Illinois Bees and Apiaries Act. According to Kocal:
“There are 2 questions that Ingram wants answered:
1) Did the IDofA, a state agency, have the right to enter Ingram’s property and confiscate a suspected “nuisance,” before Ingram had his day in court?
2) Where are his bees? The “evidence” has disappeared, and the IDofA refuses to tell Ingram where they are, before, during, and after the hearing.
”I have been keeping bees for 58 years,” Ingram said during an interview at his home and apiary. “I am not a newcomer to beekeeping, and I definitely know what I am doing. I have been teaching beginning beekeeping classes for 40 years…” At the April 4 hearing, Ingram said he felt he was able to show the court that the inspector could not tell the difference between “chilled brood” and foulbrood. He also proved to the court that the inspectors did not know the symptoms of foulbrood.”
15 Years of Research Destroyed
Ingram believes the destruction of his bees and hives is more likely to be related to his research into the effect of Roundup on honey bees. He claims some 250 of his colonies have been killed off over the years by Monsanto’s broad-spectrum herbicide, used in large quantities on both conventional- and genetically engineered crops. Ingram’s research shows that Roundup can lead to what’s called chilled brood, which is an entirely different scenario.
According to Ingram, quoted from Kocal’s article:
”When Round-Up kills the adult bees there are not enough bees left in the hive to keep the young bees (brood) warm, and the young bees die from the cold (chilled brood). I tried to prove that just because foulbrood can be detected once the hive has been disturbed, doesn’t mean the hive has foulbrood.
Inside a honeybee hive is one of the cleanest places you can find. Anything that is a problem, if the bees can’t remove it, they cover it with propolis, which is an antiseptic… When you go into the comb and cut it up, disturb it like the investigators did, then send it to a lab, it exposes foulbrood to the world. In the beehive, it’s covered up. The bees aren’t affected by it. But you can find it by sending it in to a lab.”
Ingram has studied the effects of Roundup on honeybees for the past 15 years, and he believes he had built up sufficient amount of data to show that the herbicide causes not just bee die-offs, but also Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—a mysterious phenomenon that has decimated an estimated one-third of all honey bees since 2006. While some bees inexplicably die, many simply vanish and never return to their hives. Ingram told Kocal that:
“CCD is a calamity that is affecting honeybee colonies across the nation. In fact, I had one queen, which had survived three summers of spraying and three winters. I was planning to raise daughters from that queen to see if she may have had some genetic resistance to Roundup. But she and her hive were taken during the theft. I don’t even know where the bees and my equipment are. They ruined 15 years of my research.”
… “I asked Rep. Sacia to take the teeth out of the current law, preventing untrained inspectors from doing sneak inspections without the beekeeper present, killing their bees and burning their equipment, or forcing organic beekeepers out of business, telling them that they have to use chemicals to keep bees in Illinois. Are the chemical companies really running our food supply?”
… “Is Illinois becoming a police state, where citizens do not have rights?” Ingram asked in desperation. “Knowing that Monsanto and the Dept. of Ag are in bed together, one has to wonder if Monsanto was behind the theft to ruin my research that may prove Roundup was, and is, killing honeybees. Beekeepers across the state are being threatened that the same thing may be done to their hives and livelihood. I was not treated properly, I don’t want to see this happen to anyone else in this state, and I want this type of illegal action to end.”
Monsanto is the New Owner of Leading Bee Research Firm
Ingram is quite correct about chemical companies like Monsanto—they are seeking to take nearly full control of the food supply by controlling virtually every aspect of crop production. So he has cause to be suspicious when it comes to the question of who ordered the theft and destruction of his bees. It wouldn’t be the first time the biotech giant has used questionable tactics to get rid of its adversaries. And research implicating Monsanto as the cause of CCD could definitely cause some harm to the company’s bottom line.
One of the forerunning theories of colony collapse disorder (CCD) is that it’s being caused by genetically engineered crops—either as a result of the crops themselves or the pesticides and herbicides applied on them, such as Roundup. Ingram’s research could potentially have strengthened this theory. Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is one of the most widely used herbicides there is. As a result, Monsanto has received increasing amounts of bad publicity over their potential role in the devastating demise of bees around the globe.
There’s no doubt that CCD is a serious problem. To get an idea of the magnitude of the importance of bees, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that without bees to act as pollinators, the United States alone could lose $15 billion worth of crops.ii Research into the phenomenon is therefore absolutely crucial, to identify the sources of the problem.
Monsanto however, keeping true to form, appears to have taken measures to control the direction of the research into their products’ effect on bees. As I recently reported, Monsanto has purchased one of the leading bee research firms – one that, conveniently, lists its primary goal as studying colony collapse disorder! Monsanto bought the company, called Beeologics, in September 2011, just months before Poland announced it would ban growing of Monsanto’s genetically modified MON810 maize, noting, poignantly, that “pollen of this strain could have a harmful effect on bees.”iii
The ongoing blight of genetically engineered crops has been implicated in CCD for years. In one German study,iv when bees were released in a genetically engineered rapeseed crop, then fed the pollen to younger bees, scientists discovered the bacteria in the guts of the young ones mirrored the same genetic traits as ones found in the GE crop, indicating that horizontal gene transfer had occurred.
But Roundup is not the only herbicide that has come under scrutiny. Newer systemic insecticides, known as neonicotinoids, two prominent examples of which include Imidacloprid and Clothianidin, are also frequently used on both conventional- and genetically engineered crops and have been implicated in CCD. In fact, bee colonies started disappearing in the U.S. shortly after the EPA allowed these new insecticides on the market. Even the EPA itself admits that “pesticide poisoning” is a likely cause of bee colony collapse as these pesticides weaken the bees’ immune system.
What Can You do to Help the Honeybees?
If you want to learn more about bees and CCD, I highly recommend watching the documentary film Vanishing of the Bees. The film recommends four actions you can take to help preserve honeybees everywhere:
Support organic farmers and shop at local farmer’s markets as often as possible. You can “vote with your fork” three times a day. [When you buy organic, you are making a statement by saying "no" to genetically engineered foods]
Cut the use of toxic chemicals in your house and on your lawn, and use organic pest control.
Better yet, get rid of your lawn altogether and plant a garden. Lawns offer very little benefit for the environment. Both flower and vegetable gardens provide good honey bee habitats.
Become an amateur beekeeper. Having a hive in your garden requires only about an hour of your time per week, benefits your local ecosystem, and you can enjoy your own honey!
If you are interested in more information about bee preservation, the following organizations are a good place to start.
Pesticide Action Network Bee Campaignv
The Foundation for the Preservation of Honey Beesvi
A strong earthquake has rattled the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. There are no immediate reports of damage or injuries, and no tsunami alert has been issued.
The U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude-6.3 quake struck Friday, 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of the island of Santo, at a depth of 179 kilometers (111 miles).
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not issue an alert.
Vanuatu is part of the Pacific “ring of fire.” That’s an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones stretching from Chile in South America through Alaska and down through Vanuatu to Tonga in the South Pacific.
A shallow magnitude 3.5 earthquake rumbled underneath Big Bear City on Thursday morning, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
The temblor, which occurred at 11:18 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 2.5 miles, was reported three miles from Big Bear City, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The epicenter was six miles from the town of Big Bear Lake, 11 miles from Lucerne Valley, 28 miles from San Bernardino and 82 miles from the Los Angeles Civic Center, the USGS reported.
“We just felt a rumble. It kind of shook your balance,” said Elizabeth Marsh, manger of the Big Bear Lakefront Lodge. “It was definitely a noticeable earthquake, but nothing too scary.”
Marsh said it was one of the busiest times of the year for her resort because of the Fourth of July holiday, and although some travelers said they were dizzy and got knocked off their feet by the quake, no injuries were reported.
A woman who answered the phone at the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s station in Big Bear said there had been no immediate reports of injuries or damage following the quake, which she described as a “jolt.”
According to the USGS’ “Did you feel it?” reporting system, the quake was felt as far away as Escondido.
In the last 10 days, there have been two earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.
“Being in California, you know, there are earthquakes all the time,” Marsh said. “But it was noticeable.”
NBC’s John Yang reports on the extreme weather in the Midwest and East Coast.
By msnbc.com staff and news services
The heat suffocating the Midwest is expanding east, forecasters said Thursday, as signs of the hot, muggy weather — buckled roads — have literally started to pop up.
“Record breaking heat across the Midwest is expected to spread into the eastern U.S. by the weekend,” the National Weather Service warned — bad news for the 600,000 homes and businesses still without power from Ohio to Virginia after last weekend’s storms.
On top of that, storms overnight caused power outages to 250,000 homes and businesses in Michigan.
In Chicago, temps reached 103 degrees on Thursday before a sudden storm cooled the city with a downpour.
Atlanta reached 100 — the third time so far this year.
More normal temperatures should return next week when the extreme heat is forecast to move west, bringing triple-digit temperatures to parts of Idaho, Utah, Washington and Oregon.
The storms were sandwiched between intense heat over the last two weeks. From Fargo, N.D., to Chicago and Cary, N.C., roads have heated up, drawing moisture underneath to the surface and then creating what’s called a “heave.”
In Wisconsin, the driver of an SUV didn’t see a heave on Highway 29 near Eau Claire and went airborne, WISN-TV reported Tuesday. After getting several feet of air, the car sped out of control into oncoming traffic, and then plowed into a field.
Video camera captures a car leaping over a heat-buckled road near Eau Claire, Wisconsin. NO AUDIO
The driver and passenger were not seriously hurt.
Areas where roads buckled on July 4th included Chicago, where Columbus Drive was shut down, and Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where crews deployed in the heat after a heave forced the closure of Route 222.
“I’d rather be at home, drinking my beer, eating a burger,” state transportation worker Kevin Palumbo told NBC affiliate WGAL-TV. “We just try to get it done and get it over with.”
But he was also aware of the danger of buckled roads. “It’s a hazard,” he said. “You don’t want to hit that on your motorcycle at 80 miles an hour.”
Travis Long / The News & Observer via AP
Workers wait for asphalt to arrive after removing a section of westbound I-440 that buckled in triple-digit temperatures on June 29 near Cary, N.C.
Buckled roads were just some of the frustrations still facing millions on Thursday.
In Chicago, soaring temperatures forced 17 public schools without air conditioning to cancel summer classes on Thursday, NBCChicago.com reported. Additional closures are possible in the days to come.
The Mid-Atlantic region was also struggling to get back to normal after the deadly storms.
Utility and municipal crews worked through the July 4th holiday to restore power and remove downed tree limbs. Officials blamed the storms for 26 deaths.
More than 2 million customers at one point lost power from the storms that converged on Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., Indiana, Ohio and New Jersey on Friday. They packed winds topping 80 mph in some places, uprooting trees and damaging homes.
Much of the damage to the power grid was blamed on last weekend’s rare “derecho,” a big, powerful and long-lasting wind storm that blew from the Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean.
Pepco said it had restored power to 90 percent of those affected by last week’s storms in D.C. and two Maryland suburbs, beating its own estimate for getting the air conditioning back on. BGE said about 78,000 customers in central Maryland remained without power.
More than 146,000 Virginia homes and businesses remained without power, down from a peak of about 1.2 million after the storms.
In New Jersey, Atlantic City Electric said nearly 30,000 homes and businesses were still without service. That’s down from about 206,000.
Workers in Anchorage, Alaska, are still working to clear snow from last winter’s record snowfall. KTUU’s Ted Land reports.
While the number without power was diminishing Thursday utilities were not moving quickly enough for many of those still in the sweltering dark.
Many expressed frustration with handwritten messages hung from utility poles resembling “Wanted” posters, The Washington Post reported.
Along Route 29 in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Wednesday, a woman hammered a series of signs into non-functioning utility pole reading: “5 Days No Lite.”
“Pepco: very warm humans feeling forgotten,” read another sign, according to the paper.
Maryland issued a heat advisory for the entire state for Thursday, after issuing one for parts of the state for Wednesday.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
GRAND RAPIDS MI
INDIANAPOLIS IN
BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
NORTHERN INDIANA
WILMINGTON OH
NEW YORK NY
DETROIT/PONTIAC MI
WAKEFIELD VA
DES MOINES IA
LA CROSSE WI
QUAD CITIES IA IL
CHICAGO IL
MILWAUKEE/SULLIVAN WI
KANSAS CITY/PLEASANT HILL MO
CLEVELAND OH
WICHITA KS
CHARLESTON WV
PITTSBURGH PA
STATE COLLEGE PA
LOUISVILLE KY
ST LOUIS MO
LINCOLN IL
PADUCAH KY
MOUNT HOLLY NJ
TOPEKA KS
ST LOUIS MO
KANSAS CITY/PLEASANT HILL MO
NEWPORT/MOREHEAD CITY NC
HUNTSVILLE AL
WICHITA KS
JACKSON KY
OMAHA/VALLEY NE
STATE COLLEGE PA
CHARLESTON WV
RALEIGH NC
GREENVILLE-SPARTANBURG SC
MOUNT HOLLY NJ
PITTSBURGH PA
WILMINGTON NC
BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
NEW YORK NY
MORRISTOWN TN
BLACKSBURG VA
BINGHAMTON NY
SPRINGFIELD MO
CLEVELAND OH
NASHVILLE TN
MEMPHIS TN
A series of thunderstorms that raged across parts of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula temporarily dampened record-setting high temperatures that have gripped the state for more than a week.
Across Canada, temperatures on Friday are expected to challenge records with highs predicted to reach 36 degrees in Southern Ontario, and the low 30s in Montreal and parts of Northern Ontario.
Canadian temperatures are expected to cool slightly on Saturday, peaking at 33 in both Southern Ontario and the B.C. Interior and 29 in Montreal.
In Michigan, about 325,000 DTE Energy Co. residential and business customers lost electricity after storms on Tuesday, and 195,000 remained without power Thursday after a new round of rough weather toppled trees and overhead power lines.
St. Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago and several other Midwest cities already have set record highs this week or are on the verge of doing so. And with even low temperatures setting heat records, residents are left searching for any relief.
At the height of the Michigan storms, about 97,000 Consumers Energy customers lost power. That number was down to 80,000 early Thursday afternoon, Consumers Energy spokesman Dan Bishop said.
Many communities were removing tree limbs and wires from across streets, roadways and sidewalks. Rainwater flooded low-lying portions of highways, including Interstate 475 in the Flint area.
As the latest batch of cooling rains ended early Thursday afternoon, the heat began to rise. At 2 p.m. the temperature in Grand Rapids was at 37 and Friday’s high in that city was expected to approach 40 degrees.
A high of 39 was forecast for Lansing. A concert scheduled for Friday in East Lansing was cancelled after the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning. Detroit also was expected to top 37.
Ashley Jackson lives just north of Detroit in Southfield and believes she’ll be able to endure the weather as long as her recently repaired air conditioning holds up. Ms. Jackson’s unit stopped working last weekend, leaving it inoperable for three days. “Inside the house it was 91 degrees [Fahrenheit],” the 23-year-old short-order cook said. “I left – me and my roommate – and went to the mall to get some air. We didn’t go anywhere that didn’t have air.”
At night, it was nearly unbearable. “Nobody was talking to anybody,” Ms. Jackson said. “We mostly slept, but it was hard to sleep because of the heat. I probably got about four hours of sleep each night.”
Despite the muggy conditions, heat-related illnesses and emergencies appeared to be at a minimum. Detroit Receiving Hospital treated only a few heat-related patients in its emergency room, spokesman Alton Gunn said. About a dozen cases went through Butterworth and Blodgett hospitals in Grand Rapids.
Most people complained of being light-headed and fatigued, Spectrum Health spokeswoman Susan Krieger said. Some suffered from dehydration. “We hydrated them. It’s all about the water,” Ms. Krieger said. “It’s the same message. Take the normal precautions and stay out of the heat.”
Communities across the state opened up city buildings and libraries as cooling centers. On Thursday, the Coleman A. Young Center’s lounge area was empty, but that was the exception. “It has been full, but not overpopulated,” said Morae Cochran, the centre’s supervisor.
Ship movements ground to a complete halt both at Shuwaikh and Shuaiba ports following severe sandstorms that swept the country yesterday. According to information available, three ships at berth and three ships at the loading zone at Shuwaikh Port were waiting for improvement in visibility to sail off. Similarly, four ships anchored off Shuaiba Port and four ships moored inside Shuaiba Port are also waiting for improvement in weather conditions. An official at the operations department at Shuwaikh Port, Sulaiman Al- Yahya, said that visibility was limited to one kilometer in the port area while wind speed was 40 miles, forcing the port authorities to halt ship movements until the weather improves. Al-Yahya informed that Shuwaikh Port currently has three ships at the berth while another three ships were in the waiting area. Acting Operations Director at Shuaiba Port Captain Tawfeeq Shihab told KUNA that wind-speed reached 35 knots at port area yesterday causing high waves and disrupting navigation at the port. The visibility was less than 500 m in the area, he said. As a result of the bad weather, four ships had to wait at the anchorage area and will be allowed to enter Shuaiba Port only after the weather improves, Shihab said. At the same time, the other four ships inside the port will be allowed to sail once the weather improves.
Head of the weather forecast department at Civil Aviation Osama Al-Muthan expected considerable improvement in the weather condition and visibility overnight in spite of the continuation of northwestern winds at a speed of 20-45 km per hour. Al-Muthan told KUNA that by sunrise today with the increase in earth’s temperature during the day, sandy weather condition will come back and visibility will drop on Friday and Saturday due to the Northwestern winds. The temperature is expected to drop to 44 – 45 degrees Celsius due to sandstorm that will block direct sunrays. Al-Muthan expects the high pressure to fall by Sunday and the Indian seasonal low pressure to drop. The weather will start to improve and wind speed will subside to around 40 kilometers per hour. As a result, the temperature will rise to 47 degree Celsius at Kuwait International Airport. Kuwait is currently under the impact of Indiaís seasonal low pressure from the East and high pressure from North West. These activities will be accompanied by Northwestern wind carrying sand along with it. Wind-speed is expected to exceed 70 kilometer per hour at Kuwait International Airport and visibility will be limited to only 500 meter. During the weekend, sea will be rough and waves will reach.
Authorities say a wildfire raging near Redding in northern California is threatening dozens of homes and has forced many evacuations. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said early Friday that firefighters were working through the night to control the 1,200-acre blaze. CalFire says evacuations are in effect for some neighborhoods in southwest Redding and the Happy Valley area. Some roads are also closed. The Redding Record Searchlight reports that the blaze had forced hundreds to evacuate. The paper also says 150 homes were threatened. CalFire didn’t provide precise figures. CalFire spokesman Mike Witesman told the paper late Thursday night that five homes were damaged, but he didn’t have further details. He says he doesn’t expect the blaze to grow much larger and says some evacuees might soon be allowed back home. The fire was first spotted about 2 p.m. Thursday and quickly grew.
Denver (Reuters) – Investigators probing the cause of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history have located the point of ignition but have not concluded how the blaze started, officials said on Thursday.
At its height, the 12-day-old blaze forced the evacuation of some 35,000 people in and around Colorado Springs, the state’s second most populous city, and threatened the campus of the U.S. Air Force Academy before fire crews gained an upper hand late last week. It destroyed more than 300 homes and killed two people.
Since it was first reported on June 23, the blaze has burned more than 14,000 acres of drought-parched timber and brush, mostly in the Pike National Forest about 50 miles south of the Denver metropolitan area. But as of Thursday, ground crews had managed to carve containment lines around 90 percent of the fire’s perimeter, said incident commander Rich Harvey.
Harvey said he anticipates full containment by late in the week as crews work to extinguish flames in a few stubborn areas. “When there’s been no smoke visible and no heat detected for 24 hours, we’ll be comfortable there will be no further growth and we’ll call it 100 percent contained,” Harvey said.
Investigators, led by U.S. Forest Service experts, have identified the spot where the so-called Waldo Canyon fire began. But Lieutenant Jeff Kramer, spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, said he was “not at liberty” to reveal the location because the investigation was continuing. “The cause has not yet been determined,” he added.
A task force consisting of wildfire specialists from several agencies is taking part in the investigation, including local police and fire departments, the FBI and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, police in Colorado Springs said in a statement issued on Thursday. The Colorado Springs fire follows a recent string of suspected arson fires in a neighboring county, but officials have said they had no indication that the Waldo Canyon blaze was deliberately set.
“We’re still investigating whether this is suspicious,” Colorado Springs police spokeswoman Barbara Miller said. The blaze initially gained media attention as it erupted near some of Colorado’s best known landmarks, including the famed Pikes Peak mountaintop whose panoramic summit vistas inspired the song “America the Beautiful.”
Stoked by strong, erratic winds and record triple-digit air temperatures, the fire turned deadly last Tuesday as it suddenly roared through containment lines into a residential subdivision that rests in the bluffs of the city’s western fringe. The wall of flames reduced 346 houses to ash, marking the biggest single loss of property ever from a Colorado wildfire, and President Barack Obama paid a visit to the Waldo Canyon fire zone last Friday.
The bodies of an elderly couple, William Everett, 74, and his wife, Barbara, 73, were found in the ruins of one home, raising to six the overall death toll from a state fire season authorities are calling the worst on record. Most of the residents displaced by the fire have since been allowed to return to their homes.
Meanwhile, Colorado Springs Police Chief Peter Carey said an anonymous donor has offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone who looted the homes of evacuees, following dozens of looting reports.
In all, about 60 wildfires are burning around the nation, from Alaska to Utah to Florida, and satellite images show hazy curtains of smoke hanging over huge portions of the eastern two-thirds of the country.
Smoke travels well, said Georg Grell, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo.
The hotter the fire, the higher its smoke can go – and the higher the smoke goes into the atmosphere, the farther it typically travels, Grell told OurAmazingPlanet.
“The winds are much stronger up there, so it gets transported much quicker,” he said. In addition, once smoke gets to certain altitudes, it’s less likely to be washed out of the air by rainstorms, Grell said.
Smoke from extremely hot wildfires can rise 4 to 5 miles (7 to 8 kilometers) into the atmosphere, and can even trigger massive thunderstorms, but it’s likely that the smoke from the recent spate of fires is hanging out about 1 mile (1.5 km) above the ground.
Smoky trails
An animation produced by the weather-forecasting branch of NOAA shows plumes of smoke drifting up over the Great Lakes states and reaching areas of the East Coast by June 29. [Watch the smoke animation]
The prolonged heat across the Midwest has not only set temperature records, it is also expanding and intensifying drought conditions — and relief isn’t on the horizon for most areas, the National Weather Service reported Thursday.
Drought conditions are present in 56 percent of the continental U.S., according to the weekly Drought Monitor.
That’s the most in the 12 years that the data have been compiled, topping the previous record of 55 percent set on Aug. 26, 2003. It’s also up five percentage points from the previous week.
The drought hasn’t been long enough to rank up there with the 1930s Dust Bowl or a bad stretch in the 1950s, David Miskus, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center, told msnbc.com.
“We don’t have that here yet,” he said. “This has really only started this year.”
But for a single year it’s still pretty significant, not far behind an extremely dry 1988.
While 1988 saw much drier conditions and an earlier start to the drought than this year, said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2012 has its own interesting qualities.
“This year the high temperatures have certainly played into this drought,” he told msnbc.com. “There’s a lot more evaporation … and crop demands for water.”
The Drought Monitor noted that the drought is starting to “take a significant toll” on food supplies. “In the primary growing states for corn and soybeans, 22 percent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition, as are 43 percent of the nation’s pastures and rangelands and 24 percent of the sorghum crop.”
“July 4 – 8, 2012, doesn’t look promising in terms of relief,” it added. “Modest improvement is forecast for most areas that have endured the recent heat wave, but most locations from the Plains eastward are still expected to be warmer than normal.”
Rain and cooler temps are forecast for many areas in mid-July but over the summer “drought is likely to develop, persist or intensify” across much of the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, the Corn Belt region, the Mississippi Valley and much of the Great Plains, the weather service said Thursday in its latest Seasonal Drought Outlook.
In Tennessee, the severity of the drought has been reported by county farm agents sending comments to the National Agricultural Statistics Service office in Nashville, the Associated Press reported.
“Crops have really begun to suffer and go backwards this week. Rain is needed yesterday,” wrote agent Richard Buntin in Crockett County.
Crops and pastureland are “burnt to a crispy crunch,” wrote Kim Frady of Bradley County.
“Need rain,” in Loudon County, added John Goddard. “Saw a farmer digging a waterline about 4-5′ deep. Nothing but powder!”
The weather service on Thursday did say there’s a better chance that the El Nino weather system would return by winter.
If it’s a typical El Nino, that would mean better than average rainfall for the southern tier of the U.S., Miskus noted.
“Maybe there’s some hope,” said Rippey, “but that’s way on out in the future. That’s not a short term relief.”
Fourteen people, including a 14-month-old baby, have been rescued after being left stranded due to flash flooding. The group were rescued on the Isle of Mull at about 8pm last night after severe flooding and a landslide blocked a road and washed away two bridges. Police officers and two local boat owners took the 13 adults and baby by boats to the local Benmore estate. The rescued men and women are all visitors to the island who come from England, Germany, Switzerland, New York and Hong Kong. No-one was injured in the incident. The B8035, where the group were stranded in their vehicles, is now closed in both directions with a long diversion in place. The road will be open for an hour tonight to allow the rescued motorists to retrieve their six vehicles and then the road will be closed again. It is expected that the road will remain closed for some time.
Parts of Derbyshire have been hit by flash flooding after heavy rainfall overnight. Breadsall, Beeley and Glutton Bridge are all affected as well as Ockbrook where a primary school was evacuated. The Environment Agency has issued a warning for people to be prepared as more heavy rainfall is expected over the next 24 hours. Markeaton Lane in Derby is blocked after being flooded and there are problems on the A38 near Little Eaton. Jackie Evans, chair of Beeley Parish Council, said: “I’ve never seen the speed of it – that was the frightening thing. “The road was just a complete river. “The house opposite has some pots in front and they were just floating down the drive.” Markeaton Lane in Derby is blocked in both directions between the Kedleston Road junction and the A52 Ashbourne Road junction. Moor Lane in Breadsall is also flooded near its junction with Church Lane and there are reports of considerable surface water at the A515 near Sudbury and the A52 near Brailsford. Derby’s Gay Pride event, planned for Saturday, and a T20 cricket match between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, due to take place later, have been postponed. The average monthly rainfall for the Midlands in July is about 60mm and between 20 and 60mm is predicted to fall within a few hours.
The Environment Agency has issued 124 flood alerts, which warn people to be prepared for possible flooding.
The town of Darwen in Lancashire, which was evacuated last month when rivers burst their banks – is among 35 places in the North East, the North West, the Midlands and the Anglian region of England, that are subject to a flood warning.
At Cayton Bay caravan park in North Yorkshire, Filey lifeboat crew rescued four disabled people and two carers from their caravan.
In other developments:
Fourteen tourists, including a baby, were rescued after flash flooding on the Isle of Mull, on the west coast of Scotland, on Thursday
Some sporting fixtures, including cricket, horse racing and tennis, have been affected
Meanwhile, traffic outside Silverstone was gridlocked as the first practice session for the British Grand Prix took place.
Some visitors were stranded in their cars on the A43 because they could not get into car parks which had been converted into campsites because of flooding.
And festival-goers heading for T in the Park festival, in Balado, Kinross-shire, meanwhile, were warned to come prepared for heavy rain.
The Met Office has issued an amber warning of severe weather urging people to “be prepared”, while the Environment Agency warns flooding could be the worst of the year so far with transport links and homes likely to be “severely affected”.
The BBC Weather Centre said the North West was among parts of northern England, as well as northern and central Wales, the Midlands and East Anglia, to have the most rainfall.
Between 20mm and 40mm of rain is expected to fall in central and northern areas of England, while the worst-hit places could see 60mm of rain, the average monthly fall for July.
There is no flood warning system in Northern Ireland although the Met Office has issued a yellow warning – urging people to be aware – for its south-eastern tip.
The Environment Agency’s Pete Fox told the BBC that five million homes in the UK are deemed to be at risk of flooding.
He said that, as the rain lands, the agency is using its monitoring stations and river gauging stations to predict more specifically where the weather would be worst.
“We don’t want people to worry right now but we want people to take a look at our website to work out if they are at risk of flooding,” he added.
The Environment Agency has opened incident rooms and has teams out checking on flood defences and clearing any blockages to reduce risks as much as possible.
An accelerating Jet Stream causes air to rise upwards through the atmosphere and creates low pressure centres and a greater likelihood of rain, he said.
Over the weekend, further heavy rain is forecast for parts of northern England and central and southern Scotland which will again introduce the risk of localised flooding.
And BBC weatherman Darren Bett said there was “no sign of warm dry weather for a month”.
The National Weather service in has issued a flash flood warning for northern Bernalillo and southern Sandoval counties until 7:30 p.m. Heavy rain is falling at rates just under 2 inches an hour from a slow-moving storm moving drifting northward through metro Albuquerque. Urban flooding and sudden, dangerous flows through arroyos and flood-control channels are expect. The rain came fast and furious in parts of Albuquerque Thursday, turning parking lots and streets into ponds right in the middle of rush hour. In one hour nearly two inches fell in the metro area which can cause problems for a city that slopes down into a river. The North Valley got the worst of the storm and Glenda Gray’s home was in the middle of it. She says she had to put rags at the door to keep water from coming in. She quickly called county firefighters who put up bags and drained the water. “We never would have been able to stop everything if it hadn’t been for the fire department,” Gray said. Other parts of town were hit hard too. People at Isotopes Park waited out the storm in cars. As the clouds rolled by, cars splashed by soaking one of our news cameras. A parking lot on Coors and Montano could have easily been mistaken for a pond. The city’s drainage system got a massive workout in the pounding storm. A spokeswoman for the City of Albuquerque says crews responded to three calls of homes being flooded. The County says they received one call of a flooded home, and that was Gray’s.
GUWAHATI The death toll in the Asom floods on Thursday rose to 100 even as the waters started to recede in most of the 27 affected districts except Dhemaji.
However, the rising water level of the Jiadhal river submerged several villages in the morning. The surging waters have also affected parts of National Highway 52 in the district.
“The waters of Brahmaputra river that flooded the district along with other parts of the state since June 22 have started to recede and people have begun returning to their homes from relief camps,” Dhemaji Deputy Commissioner MS Manivannan said.
“However, the water of Jiadhal has inundated some villages of the district on Thursday. People there have been shifted to higher places,” he said, adding that the administration was extending all possible help to the flood victims.
Meanwhile, 16 people died in a landslide while another 16 are reported missing from various districts across the state.
With 31 deaths, Barpeta district recorded the highest number of human casualties due to floods till Thursday. The State Disaster Management Authority said conditions were improving in almost all the 27 districts except Dhemaji.
Gauhati Raging floodwaters fed by monsoon rains have inundated more than 2,000 villages in northeast India, killing at least 27 people and leaving hundreds of thousands more marooned Friday. The Indian air force was delivering food packages to people huddled on patches of dry land along with cattle and wild elephants. Rescuers were being dropped by helicopter into affected areas to help the stranded. About one million people have been forced to evacuate as the floods from the swollen Brahmaputra River – one of Asia’s largest – swamped 2,084 villages across most of Assam state, officials said. Officials have counted 27 people dead so far, but the toll is expected to be much higher as unconfirmed casualty reports mount. Telephone lines were knocked out and some train services were cancelled after their tracks were swamped by mud. As the floods soaked the Kaziranga game reserve east of Assam’s capital of Gauhati, motorists reported seeing a one-horned rhino fleeing along a busy highway. “We never thought the situation would turn this grim when the monsoon-fed rivers swelled a week ago,” said Nilomoni Sen Deka, an Assam government minister. Residents of Majuli – an 800-square-kilometre island in the middle of the Brahmaputra River – watched helplessly as the swirling, grey waters swallowed 50 villages and swept away their homes. “We are left with only the clothes we are wearing,” said 60-year-old Puniram Hazarika, one of about 75,000 island residents now camping in makeshift shelters of bamboo sticks and plastic tarps on top of a mud embankment. A herd of 70 endangered Asiatic elephants, which usually avoid humans, were grouped together nearby, Majuli island wildlife official Atul Das said. “The jumbos have not caused any harm, but we are keeping a close watch,” he said.
An unidentified disease has killed 60 young children in Cambodia in three months, the World Health Organization said Tuesday as it raced to identify the cause. “The number of deaths reported to WHO is 60 cases and they have all been in young children,” said Dr Nima Asgari, a public health specialist for the UN body in Cambodia, adding that the first casualties were reported in April. The WHO is currently working with the Cambodian Ministry of Health “to identify the cause and the route of spread of this disease”, he said. With the investigation still at an early stage, Asgari said it was difficult to specify the symptoms, which “include high fever and severe chest disease symptoms, plus in some children there were signs of neurological involvement”. There have been 61 reported cases so far, Asgari said, with just one patient surviving. The victims, all aged seven and under, were admitted to hospitals in the capital Phnom Penh and the northwestern tourist hub of Siem Reap. In separate comments the WHO said there were no signs yet of contagion. “To date, there is no report of any staff or any neighbouring patients to the cases at the hospitals becoming sick with similar symptoms,” it said. Asgari confirmed there was “no cluster of the cases yet” but said the high mortality rate in such a short space of time was worrisome. “WHO is always concerned about a disease which causes death in such high numbers of children,” he said. Cambodian health ministry officials were not immediately available for comment.
Biohazard name:
Unidentified fatal disease
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Symptoms:
The symptoms include high fever and severe chest disease symptoms, plus in some children there were signs of neurological involvement.
A day after Dhanera was declared “cholera-hit”, 25 more persons were hospitalised with diarrheal symptoms in this town of Banaskantha district on Thursday. Health authorities sent back, with medicines and advice, 69 others who suspected they were suffering from the illness. Officials from the epidemiology division of the state’s Health Department said a notification about the disease’s outbreak on Wednesday may have triggered mild panic, leading to the large turnout. The district administration had declared an outbreak in the town and nine surrounding villages after five persons died and 222 persons were hospitalised for diarrheal symptoms in the preceding week. Authorities believe the outbreak may have been caused by an unauthorised connection that diverted water from the main pipeline connecting the Sipu dam, the town’s main water source. Four such connections, or leakages, were detected soon after the outbreak and one of them – a plastic pipe that ran through a gutter – is believed to be the source. Authorities had earlier tested water from the dam and from bores within the water-scarce town but found no contamination there.
Biohazard name:
Cholera
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Indonesia’s health ministry today announced the death of an 8-year-old girl from an H5N1 avian influenza infection, according to a report from the Jakarta Globe. The girl, from West Java province, got sick on Jun 18 during a trip to Singapore. Six days later her symptoms worsened and she was admitted to a Jakarta hospital with signs of pneumonia. She was transferred two more times and required treatment with a ventilator. A health ministry official told the Globe that she tested positive for the virus on Jun 29 and died on Jul 3. The official said she had often walked past a live-bird market on her way to school, and 6 days before she got sick she had helped carry freshly killed birds home from the market with her father. If the World Health Organization (WHO) confirms the girl’s H5N1 illness and death, she will be listed as Indonesia’s 190th case-patient and its 158th fatality from the disease.
Biohazard name:
A/H5N1
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Chinese state media say a toxic gas leak caused by chemicals used nine years ago to combat the SARS epidemic has forced more than 800 workers to evacuate from a downtown office building in east China’s Hangzhou city. The gas came from a stockpile of chlorine dioxide powder. It was used as a disinfectant in 2003 during the SARS scare but was never disposed of. White smog filled the 19th floor of the building on Friday morning, causing panic. The fire department as saying no one was injured. It did not say what caused the chemicals to leak.
Unless you live in Seattle, you likely did not know that the National Weather Service just announced that the city endured its third coolest June on record. As much of America swelters through a heat wave, it’s not surprising that the usual suspects are telling everyone that it’s because of “global warming.”
I have a longtime friend, Ron Marr who has a Jack Russell Terrier and in a recent commentary for Missouri Life magazine, he wrote that, “Jack doesn’t believe in global warming in the least; he does not believe the recent atmospheric hellfire results from ozone holes or aerosol cans or giant leprechauns with a big magnifying glass. We share the same views on the topic and have discussed them often. Our considered opinion is that this streak of blazing nonsense stems from the fact that – to put it in scientific terms – it’s summer and the sun is hot.”
On July 3rd Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, a newswire service that has been reporting global warming lies for decades, wrote that “If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.”
It’s summertime, Seth! It gets hot in the summer!
It did not take long for the high priests of global warming to proclaim the current WEATHER to be CLIMATE. There’s a very big difference. Weather is what is occurring now while climate is measured in terms of centuries. It’s about trends and cycles.
It surely has been a hot summer thus far. Reuters reported that “more than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States.” The announcement was made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on July 2nd.
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi took another reporter to task for coupling the heat wave with global warming, pointing out that “The US is less than 10% of the globe” while ignoring that “Scandinavia had coldest June on record and that Australia is having a bad winter.”
What we should all know by now is that the Warmists all use trickery to advance their hoax.
The simple fact is that heat waves are nothing new. In 1936 a North American heat wave was the most severe in the modern history of the continent. It occurred in the middle of the Great Depression, killing more than 5,000 Americans and desiccating vast amounts of crops. To put it in perspective, there were no home air conditioning appliances at the time. People depended on fans to circulate the air.
The sun surely is hot, but its heat – solar radiation – has not been sufficient to avoid cyclical ice ages and short term periods of intense cold because the sun itself goes through cycles of increasing and diminishing solar radiation.
There was a “Little Ice Age” that lasted between 1550 and 1850. Temperatures dropped to the point that the Thames River in England froze over and “frost fairs” were held on its surface. It was felt through Europe and parts of North America.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley noted that “Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods,” adding that “this warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end.”
The average length of interglacial periods is 11,500 years.
In the 1970s, prior to the global warming hoax, many scientists were convinced that a new ice age had begun. In January 2012, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Habibullo Abdusamatov, predicted that the next ice age will begin in 2014 and will last at least two centuries. Regarding the timing, he could be right. He could be wrong. One thing is sure. The Earth is overdue another ice age.
My friend, Robert W. Felix, the author of Not by Fire, But by Ice, is an expert on ice ages and magnetic reversals. It is the latter that accompanied mass extinctions such as the dinosaur’s fate and many other species at the end of the Cretaceous period. In ice ages, the Earth’s water doesn’t disappear, it turns to ice. The current growth of the planet’s glaciers is an indicator of what is actually occurring.
Another indicator, of course, is the sun. On January 29, 2012, writing in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, David Rose noted that “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.”
“After emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters, and a shortening of the season available for growing food. Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.”
“We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24′…but sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th century.” Oddly, despite the obvious and documented effect of the sun on the planet’s average temperature, there remain scientists who are unconvinced of its essential role. Only a relative few even understand the role of magnetic reversals on the planet’s history.
Actually, the diminishing number of sunspots has been known for a while. In June 2010, Stuart Clark, writing in The New Scientist, observed that “For the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”
The obvious often catches people by surprise. The last Ice Age came on very swiftly and the next is likely to do so as well. In the meantime, the current heat wave will capture everyone’s attention.
“It’s like the classic magician’s trick — now you see it, now you don’t,” said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research.
“Only in this case, we’re talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!”
“It’s as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared,” said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy.
“This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn’s rings.
The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury.”
The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature.“A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don’t have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star,” said Melis, a former UCLA astronomy graduate student.
“The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event.”
Dust today, gone tomorrow. An artist’s conceptualization of the dusty TYC 8241 2652 system as it may have appeared several years ago, when it was emitting large amounts of excess infrared radiation. (Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook))Melis describes the star, designated TYC 8241 2652, as a “young analog of our sun” that only a few years ago displayed all of the characteristics of “hosting a solar system in the making,” before transforming completely. Now, very little of the warm, dusty material thought to originate from collisions of rocky planets is apparent.
“Nothing like this has ever been seen in the many hundreds of stars that astronomers have studied for dust rings,” Zuckerman said. “This disappearance is remarkably fast, even on a human time scale, much less an astronomical scale. The dust disappearance at TYC 8241 2652 was so bizarre and so quick, initially I figured that our observations must simply be wrong in some strange way.”
Norm Murray, director of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, who was not part of the research group, said, “The history of astronomy has shown that events that are not predicted and hard to explain can be game-changers.”
The dust had been present around the star since at least 1983 (no one had observed the star in the infrared before then), and it continued to glow brightly in the infrared for 25 years. In 2009, it started to dim. By 2010, the dust emission was gone; the astronomers observed the star twice that year from the Gemini Observatory in Chile, six months apart. An infrared image obtained by the Gemini telescope as recently as May 1 of this year confirmed that the warm dust has now been gone for two-and-a-half years.
Like Earth, warm dust absorbs the energy of sunlight and re-radiates that heat energy as infrared radiation.
Because so much dust had been orbiting around the star, planets very likely are forming there, said Zuckerman, whose research is funded by NASA.
The lack of an existing model for what is going on around this star is forcing astronomers to rethink what happens within young solar systems in the making. The dust likely resulted from a violent collision — but that would not explain where it went. Was it somehow swallowed by the star?
“Although we’ve identified a couple of mechanisms that are potentially viable, none are really compelling,” Melis said. “In one case, gas produced in the impact that released the dust helps to quickly drag the dust particles into the star and thus to their doom. In another possibility, collisions of large rocks left over from an original major impact provide a fresh infusion of dust particles into the disc, which then instigate a runaway process where small grains chip into oblivion both themselves and also larger grains.”
Major dusty regions are known to exist in our own solar system and include the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and another located beyond the orbit of Neptune. Nearly 30 years ago, NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) first discovered many similar regions orbiting other stars — but no disappearing act like the one at TYC 8241 2652 has ever been seen during these three decades.
The research is based on multiple sets of observations of TYC 8241 2652 obtained with the Thermal-Region Camera Spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile, the IRAS, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, NASA’s Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the Herschel Space Telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA), and AKARI (a Japanese/ESA infrared satellite).
“We were lucky to catch this disappearing act,” Zuckerman said. “Such events could be relatively common, without our knowing it.” MessageToEagle.com via University of California – Los Angeles
Police had to launch a desperate late-night rescue operation in China after a section of highway collapsed into a giant sinkhole, trapping a car and killing at least one passenger.
The cavernous hole appeared along a busy stretch of Xiangjiang Road in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, central China, early this morning. The 30m-square pit swallowed a passing car, and at least one person died at the scene before emergency services could haul anyone to safety.
Chinese authorities did not describe the car which fell into the hole, or identify the victims, but said the vehicle was likely a BMW carrying three people, according to CNN.
The cave-in site was close to the Xiangjiang River, a major tributary of the Yangtze, China’s longest waterway
One rescuer with the local fire brigade described the sinkhole as being so deep, ‘we cannot see the bottom of the pit with the naked eye’. Local police closed the road off as crowds gathered, with investigators trying to establish what caused the road to collapse.
A sinkhole is a natural depression in the Earth’s surface which can be formed gradually or suddenly and occur worldwide.
They can vary in size, from 1 to 600 meters both in depth and diameter and form when the foundation below the surface layer dissolves. This commonly occurs when the rock below is dissolved by ground water. Limestone, carbonate rock, and salt beds are particular vulnerable to erosion. Meanwhile, the top layer of Earth usually stays intact.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania are the states most affected by sinkholes.
While they often occur from natural causes, sinkholes can be man-made and caused by human activity. Groundwater pumping and construction are the most likely culprits.
Last month, residents in Florida, U.S, looked on in horror as a 40ft wide hole opened up in their street. It completely swallowed up the rear of this house in Hudson, Pasco County. The house collapsed into the ground like a toy house with its contents spilling everywhere.
The owner of the home was an elderly woman whose husband died a few years ago. She lived at the property on her own but was fortunately not at the house when the incident happened.
Eleven families were evacuated from a Bay Ridge apartment building after a sinkhole opened up on the sidewalk in front of a 92nd St. building on Thursday, according to authorities.
The residents were evacuated as a precaution, authorities said. The sinkhole developed in the afternoon on the west side of the sidewalk on 92nd Street near Third Avenue.
“It’s deep. It goes down about 50 feet,” said Capt. Richard DiBlasio, commanding officer of the 68th Precinct.
Adding to the concern was the fact that the sinkhole was located next to a sewer underground, according to DiBlasio.
“It’s hitting a sewer,” he said.
The block of 92nd Street between Third Avenue and Ridge Boulevard was closed to vehicular traffic as emergency crews from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection inspected the sinkhole. The area around the sinkhole was roped off with yellow tape to prevent pedestrians from getting too close.
Officials from the city’s Office of Emergency Management were also at the scene.
DEP crews filled the sinkhole with dirt to prevent any further erosion from taking place, News 12 Brooklyn reported.
DiBlasio assigned cops to the corner of 92nd Street and Third Avenue to redirect traffic.
Residents said the sinkhole literally swallowed a tree that stood on the sidewalk and sucked it below ground.
“It was unbelievable. One minute there was a tree there and the next minute there wasn’t,” one resident said as he watched the emergency crew at the scene.
As emergency crews and cops worked, two local eateries had a front row seat to all of the activity. The sinkhole was located a few yards from a Starbucks coffee shop at 9202 Third Ave. On the opposite corner is Paneantico, a café at 9124 Third Ave., which has tables on the sidewalk on both the Third Avenue and the 92nd Street sides of the eatery. Several customers sat at tables on the sidewalk and sipped cappuccinos while they watched the city crews at work.
The residents who had been evacuated were allowed to return to their apartments within a few hours, authorities said.
Around one million birds have died or were culled at 111 poultry farms and 15 farms in Jalisco, Mexico, where the National Health and Quality Agribusiness Service (Senasica) detected in ten such facilities the AH7N3 strain of avian flu. The Senasica said it issued license to import a vaccine from Asia to be distributed at the disease-hit states where the birds are being buried with due prophylaxis (quarantine, cull and vaccination) to contain the spread and get rid of the virus. FAO also issued a call to check the outbreak since the bird flu virus is very aggressive, adding that its presence now enters Mexico in the WHO watch list though Mexican authorities claim the strain is not a threat to human poultry consumption.
Biohazard name:
AH7N3
Biohazard level:
3/4 Hight
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.
An outbreak of the H7N3 bird flu virus in western Mexico has infected about 2.5 million chickens and led authorities to destroy or dispose of almost a million birds.
The country’s Agriculture Department said 129 farms in the western state of Jalisco have been inspected.
Flu was confirmed in birds at 24 of the sites and tests continued on most of the rest.
The farms in question have been placed under quarantine, the department said in a statement.
The outbreak has caused increases in the price of chicken and egg products in Mexico.
Thousands of dead, rotting fish are fouling Silver Lake along Rehoboth Beach’s southern border, the victims of high temperatures and algae that consumed too much of the lake’s oxygen. The Fish and Wildlife Division of the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control said 1,500 gizzard shad, 2 to 4 inches long, were found floating Wednesday, along with 800 white perch. Overnight, thousands more fish died, with as many as 6,000 gizzard shad and 600 adult white perch succumbing by Thursday, along with blue gills and largemouth bass in smaller numbers. “Increased temperatures lead to warmer water, which holds less dissolved oxygen,” John Clark, DNREC Fisheries administrator, said in a news release. “So seeing more fish kills this summer as the heat continues would come as no surprise.” The dead fish, and the sharp, dank odor that could be sniffed from blocks away, was an unwelcome development in the wealthy neighborhood around the lake, where plenty of vacationers were in town. “Yesterday, it was the little fish. Today, it’s the big fish,” said Mary Iannicelli, walking on a side street near the lake. “We’re just wondering if they’re gonna clean it up.” Sherry Chappelle, who’s lived here for 15 years, said it was the first fish kill she’d seen, although she had heard of others. Silver Lake last had a major fish kill in 2008.
“The fact that it’s so hot can’t have helped,” she said, resting in a tree’s shade as the afternoon temperatures climbed to a recorded 99 degrees. “[The kill] is definitely not surprising, just because the conditions were really good for a fish kill in that lake,” said Chris Bason, executive director at the Delaware Center for Inland Bays. “The lake is surrounded by a lot of developments and there is a lot of storm water runoff that runs into it.” Bason said the runoff offers nutrients that provide food for phytoplankton, microscopic floating algae that produce oxygen during the day, but use oxygen at night.Bacteria in the lake are using oxygen too, and in shallow water bodies, oxygen fluctuates a lot between day and night, he said. Combined with the recent heat driving oxygen levels down, it’s a deadly cocktail. “I’m sure in a portion of that lake there is no oxygen,” Bason said Wednesday. “It confused the fish and killed them.” Clark said water testing by DNREC biologists confirmed fatally low levels of dissolved oxygen in the lake’s surface water. Most of the dead fish accumulated in the lake’s northwest corner. “From what I have seen, it’s not nearly as big as the one that happened three or four years ago,” said Mark Brown, owner of Silver Lake Guest House. “It isn’t driving people away from the lake, yet. It’s mostly small fish from what I’ve seen. I don’t know if it’s going to get worse or not.” Rehoboth Beach City Manager Gregory Ferrese said sea gulls are eating some of the dead fish. Many of the carcasses are in the middle of the lake, about 20 feet from the shoreline. Mayor Sam Cooper said it appeared the job of cleaning up the dead fish would fall to the city. “DNREC’s denying any responsibility,” he said, “so the city’s going to do it, I guess, the best we can, starting tomorrow morning.”
Biohazard name:
Mass. Die-off (fishes)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
03.07.2012
Biological Hazard
China
Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, [The area was not defined.]
China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region has reported an outbreak of H5N1 in poultry, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) announced Monday. The disease has killed 1,600 chickens raised by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a unique economic and semi-military government organization of about 2.5 million people. A total of 5,500 XPCC-farmed chickens showed symptoms of suspected avian flu on June 20, according to the MOA. The National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory Monday confirmed the epidemic was H5N1 bird flu after testing samples collected at the farm, the MOA said. Local authorities have sealed off and sterilized the infected area, where a total of 156,439 chickens have been culled and safely disposed of to prevent the disease from spreading, according to the MOA. Bird flu, or avian influenza, is a contagious disease of animal origin caused by viruses that normally infect only birds and, less commonly, pigs. It can be fatal to humans.
Biohazard name:
H5N1 – Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
The map is rare and it is truly remarkable that it survived the Second World War unscathed.
The American continent was “christened” by the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.
Now, a previously unknown variant of the famous world map from the mapmaker’s workshop has unexpectedly turned up in the collections in the University Library in Munich.
When Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel officially handed over the famous map of the world printed by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470 — 1522) to the Library of Congress In Washington in 2007, she referred to it as “a wonderful token of the particularly close ties of friendship between Germany and America.”
And indeed, the gesture had great symbolic weight, for the chart — then exactly 500 years old — can be seen as America’s birth certificate.
On this map, the New World appears for the first time under the name “America,” chosen to honor the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451 — 1512), whom Waldseemüller erroneously regarded as the discoverer of the continent.
The chart, which is registered in “Memory of the World,” UNESCO’s inventory of the world’s documentary heritage, is now on show in the Library of Congress in Washington.The map was formerly held in a private German collection, and was included as Object No. 01301 on the list of specially protected German Cultural Treasures, which prohibits their sale and export.
Before the Library could purchase the map from the previous owner and obtain an export license, the object had first to be delisted.
The application to delist was granted at the direction of the Chancellor’s Office in 2001.
The 1507 world map is a wall map, with an area of three square meters. But the much smaller maps, the so-called globe segments, that Waldseemüller also produced were at least as important for the dissemination of geographical knowledge in his own time.
These depict the world in twelve individual segments, or rather surface wedges, which taper to a point at each end and are printed on a single sheet, like cut-outs on construction paper. When correctly arranged, they form a small globe of about 11 cm in diameter. And in the three rightmost wedges, one sees a huge, boomerang-shaped landmass in the middle of an immense ocean.
The globe places America in the remotest West, seen from Europe and Africa, on the far side of a wide, wide sea.
The surprise find in the stacks at Munich University Library: The segmented world map made by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1507). (Credit: Source: Munich University Library)A “packaged tour” of a new world
The wall map was only a part of a carefully designed package put together by the cartographer Waldseemüller and his colleague Matthias Ringmann in their workshop in the monastery of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges — a combination with which they no doubt hoped to revolutionize how the world was perceived. In addition to the large map, the package included an introduction to the principles of geography or “cosmography” (the Cosmographiae Introductio) — and the segmental maps.
Only a handful of the perhaps 100 sets printed from the original woodblocks are known to have survived. The copy now in Washington, which belonged to the princely House of Waldburg-Wolfegg and Waldsee in Germany, is the sole copy of the large world map that has come down to us. A copy of the Cosmographiae Introductio is among the treasures kept in the Munich University Library (MUL).
Four copies of the segmental maps were previously known to researchers. Three of them are now in Minneapolis, Offenburg and in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, respectively. The fourth was sold at auction for the handsome sum of 1 million dollars by Christie’s in 2005. Members of the staff of the University Library have — quite by accident — now discovered a fifth.
“The newly discovered sheet differs in a number of details from the copies that were already known, and can therefore be regarded as unique,” says Sven Kuttner, Curator of the Library’s Department of Early Printed Books. For one thing, the outlines of the upper halves of the lanceolate sections are much less distinctively incised. The position of Calicut on the Malabar Coast, where Vasco da Gama (1469 — 1523) had made landfall in May 1498, is shown on the fourth, not the fifth, segment of the global map. The style of hatching and the forms of certain letters also differ from their counterparts in other copies. Furthermore, according to Kuttner, the watermark impressed in the paper suggests that “this version may have been printed at some time after the first edition of 1507, somewhere in Alsace.”
The time traveler
The “new” Munich copy of the segmented map itself has obviously followed a tortuous course to reach its present haven. And the story of this voyage is at least as fascinating as that of the discovery and exploration of the New World. Its latest chapter began only a few days ago in the Munich University Library. While working on an ongoing revision of the catalogs, a bibliographer came across something quite sensational in an otherwise unremarkable volume that had been rebound in the 19th century. Tucked in between two printed works on geometry from the early 16th century was the unsought map — a double-page spread in roughly A4 format. The three prints obviously date from the same period, but is there a direct connection between the not entirely disparate subjects? The 19th-century librarians, at any rate, had failed to recognize the significance of Waldseemüller’s map, Kuttner remarks. The first copy of the segmental maps to be discovered only turned up in 1871, in the Hauslab-Liechtenstein Library in Vienna. “And the Munich copy was returned to the obscurity of the stacks.”
But it survived the Second World War unscathed, although the University Library itself was devastated by air raids. In November 1942, large portions of the holdings of older books, including the unassuming volume containing the two geometry treatises, had been transferred to a safer rural location. Stefan Kuttner has ascertained that the book was among the contents of deposit box No. 340, which was first stowed away in Burghausen, and later transported to Niederviehbach near Landshut. The box was returned to Munich in 1955, and provisionally stored in the Northeastern Repository at LMU.
Credit: Source: Munich University LibraryRegrettably, according to Kuttner, the origins of this copy of the segmented world map remain mysterious. One of the works on geometry with which it was bound belonged to the Monastery Library in Oberalteich. The contents of that collection, some 1,400 volumes in all, came into the possession of the University Library, then located in Landshut, during the secularization phase after the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803.
On the other hand, the map could also be directly related to the copy of the Cosmographiae Introductio in the University Library’s own collection. This is a unique early edition with a two-page colored map of the world, sketched in a rather cursory fashion with pen and ink. It was originally part of the collection assembled by the Swiss humanist and polymath Heinrich Loriti Glareanus (1488 — 1563).
The contents of Glarean’s library were acquired by Johann Egolph von Knöringen (1537 — 1575), a later Bishop of Augsburg, when he was still a student at Freiburg University. In 1573, he stipulated in his will that his books, more than ,6000 volumes in all, were to be donated as an endowment to the University Library of Ingolstadt, the forerunner of the Munich University Library.
“Even in our digital age, the originals have lost none of their significance and unique fascination. Treasures like the newly discovered map can only be brought to light by people who work directly with originals,” says Klaus-Rainer Brintzinger, the Director of the University Library, and adds: “We intend to make the map accessible to the public in digital form in time for the Fourth of July — Independence Day in the USA.” MessageToEagle.com. via Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (LMU)
Their age is estimated to thousands of years and their purpose remains unknown.
These puzzling wheel-shapes, and straight lines, stretch all the way from Syria to Saudi Arabia.
Some call this area the Middle East’s own version of the Nazca Lines.
It is only recently, with help of satellite images that archaeologists have been able to explore this region in more detail.
Since the launch of Google Earth in 2005, archeologists have begun to use the satellite imagery publicly, particularly since its gradual incorporation, beginning in 2007, of high-resolution images. As a result, over some Arab countries-Jordan, Syria and Lebanon particularly-the resolution of available images is now generally high enough to conduct reliable, general archeological surveys.
The Shuway-mas site south of Hayil, Saudi Arabia, which is not even mentioned in the 1998 edition of the Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art is the home of one of the four best collections of ancient rock art in the world. Here we find, numerous ancient stone kites, mounds, and tails.
Arabian Peninsula: The dark lines are the remains of stone walls barely visible on the ground.In the Harrat Khaybar region of Saudi Arabia, however, “kites” take on entirely different shapes-most notably the “square pocket” and “barbed arrow”-and the low walls of many of them show ruler-straight lines, raising new questions for archeologists.Some of these low walls of stone-many long known to archeologists inside Saudi Arabia-are newly visible from any computer in the world. The high-resolution image swaths reveal stunningly well-preserved evidence of widespread human activity in the distant past.
Arabian Peninsula: The dark lines are the remains of stone walls barely visible on the ground.
In the Al-Hayit region, keyhole and pendant shapes vary in size from a few meters to dozens of meters, and they are often found arranged along “avenues” that are invisible to builders of modern highways.Who created these structures and for what purpose?In the 1920′s when British Royal Air Force pilots flew over the northern Harrat Harrah, they were struck by the numbers and variety of archeological remains visible in that rugged, thinly populated landscape.In Jordan, there are similar structures visible for the air. The Bedouin say the structures and walls are “the works of the Old Men”.
In the barren desert landscape, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, there are thousands upon thousands of elaborate stone wheels, measuring up to 70 metres wide and visible only from the sky.
Flt Lt Percy Maitland documented the presence of the mysterious structures in a 1927 article for the archaeological journal Antiquity.They remained largely a secret until the 1970s when Dr David Kennedy, now a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia, saw them in great numbers while studying old survey photographs from Jordan.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Dr Kennedy led an aerial photography project aimed at documenting Jordanian archaeological sites.
“These structures are largely unknown,” he said. “Frequently, you can’t see any of these structures from the ground.
Or you can just see a jumble of boulders that don’t make any sense. But you go up a small distance and they are extraordinary.”
Giant stone structures form wheel shapes with spokes often radiating inside. Here a cluster of wheels in the Azraq Oasis. CREDIT: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0237 A close-up of one of the mysterious circles. Credit: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0257 This drawing reveal the various shapes these structures can take. Credit: Stafford Smith The stone circles’ age is unknown. They are at least 2,000 years old, but could have been built up to 9,000 years ago.
Compared to the Peruvian desert’s Nazca drawings – which date as far back as the year 400, number in the hundreds and have a maximum breadth of about 270 metres – the Middle East patterns are more numerous, bigger and much older.
“These volcanic lava fields are the last place you’d expect to find these kinds of structures,” Dr Kennedy said. “The landscape is not hospitable. It looks bleak and barren. They’re so unusual.”
At least 3,000 structures have been found in Jordan and Dr Kennedy’s recent research has documented nearly 2,000 in Saudi Arabia.
As seen, there are a huge number, variety and forms of figures in different regions. Unfortunately, there are still many unanswered questions. We do not know why they were built. Neither do we know when they were constructed or by whom…. @ MessageToEagle.com.
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Privacy advocates this week said they are dismayed, but not surprised about a New York Criminal Court judge’s decision 
As many as 300,000 PCs and Macs will drop off the Internet in about 65 hours unless their owners heed last-minute calls to scrub their machines of malware.
The FBI’s “Operation Ghost Click” ended with arrests of six Estonian men — a seventh, a Russian, remains at large — the C&C seizures, and the substitution of the replacement servers. Without the substitutes, DNSChanger-infected systems would have been immediately knocked off the Internet.
At times, that worked.
“What we need in the future is a real-time alerting capability,” said Rasmussen, and described a system that would immediately notify a user if his or her computer had been shunted to a substitute server. The idea was discussed by the DCWG, but never implemented because it would have required much more hardware and support than was available.
Travis Long / The News & Observer via AP
MessageToEagle.com – Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.
MessageToEagle.com – On this newly discovered unique, ancient map. the New World is mentioned for the first time under the name “America.
The surprise find in the stacks at Munich University Library: The segmented world map made by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1507). (Credit: Source: Munich University Library)
MessageToEagle.com – Thousands of huge ancient structures made of stone are clearly visible from the air.
Arabian Peninsula: The dark lines are the remains of stone walls barely visible on the ground.
In the Harrat Khaybar region of Saudi Arabia, however, “kites” take on entirely different shapes-most notably the “square pocket” and “barbed arrow”-and the low walls of many of them show ruler-straight lines, raising new questions for archeologists.Some of these low walls of stone-many long known to archeologists inside Saudi Arabia-are newly visible from any computer in the world. The high-resolution image swaths reveal stunningly well-preserved evidence of widespread human activity in the distant past.
In the Al-Hayit region, keyhole and pendant shapes vary in size from a few meters to dozens of meters, and they are often found arranged along “avenues” that are invisible to builders of modern highways.
Who created these structures and for what purpose?
In the 1920′s when British Royal Air Force pilots flew over the northern Harrat Harrah, they were struck by the numbers and variety of archeological remains visible in that rugged, thinly populated landscape.In Jordan, there are similar structures visible for the air. The Bedouin say the structures and walls are “the works of the Old Men”.
Giant stone structures form wheel shapes with spokes often radiating inside. Here a cluster of wheels in the Azraq Oasis. CREDIT: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0237 
A close-up of one of the mysterious circles. Credit: David D. Boyer APAAME_20080925_DDB-0257 
This drawing reveal the various shapes these structures can take. Credit: Stafford Smith The stone circles’ age is unknown. They are at least 2,000 years old, but could have been built up to 9,000 years ago.
