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Limits sought on weed killer glyphosate to help monarch butterflies
By Louis Sahagun
February 25, 2014, 8:04 a.m.
With monarch butterfly populations rapidly dwindling, a conservation organization on Monday asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to implement tougher rules for the weed killer glyphosate — first marketed under the brand name Roundup — to save America’s most beloved insect from further decline.
In a petition, the Natural Resources Defense Council argued that current uses of glyphosate are wiping out milkweed, the only plant upon which monarch caterpillars feed. The loss of milkweed is having a devastating effect on the life cycles of the large, fragile orange-and-black butterflies, which migrate through the United States, Canada and Mexico.
It takes several generations of the insect scientists know as Danaus plexippus to make the round trip because each monarch lives only a few weeks in the summer.
Since federal glyphosate rules were last updated a decade ago, its use has spiked tenfold to 182 million pounds a year, largely due to the introduction and popularity of corn and soybeans genetically modified to resist the herbicide, the petition says.
“The tenfold increase in the amount of glyphosate being used corresponds with huge losses of milkweed and the staggering decline of the monarch,” Sylvia Fallon, an NRDC senior scientist, said in an interview. “We are seeking new safeguards desperately needed to allow enough milkweed to grow.”
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-monarch-butterfly-roundup-20140224,0,1342942.story
SeaWorld Cited By USDA For Violating Animal Welfare Act
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has cited SeaWorld Orlando for violating the Animal Welfare Act, namely for keeping expired veterinary materials and for neglecting to repair dislodged and crumbling rubber flooring which animals walk on during performances at the park. The citations are the result of a January 13, 2014 inspection, records of which were just obtained by PETA. During the most recent inspection, dozens of expired surgical sutures were found in the park’s surgery room which can lead to life-threatening infections in the animals.
SeaWorld, the subject of intense media scrutiny after the release of the 2013 CNN documentary "Blackfish," had been issued a citation in 2007 for the same rubber flooring issue and the park was cited in 2013 for failing to keep a dolphin tank and an area surrounding an orca performance tank in a safe condition.
"The tiny tanks at SeaWorld are inherently cruel, and when the tanks and surrounding areas are also rusting, peeling, and flaking, they're downright dangerous for the animals confined there," says PETA Foundation Deputy General Counsel Delcianna Winders in a release.
You can learn more about SeaWorld's history here, and sign a petition to end SeaWorld's orca breeding program here.
https://www.thedodo.com/seaworld-cited-by-usda-for-vio-442662091.html
Things I learned during the Alabama Legislature's Ten Commandments debate
By Kyle Whitmire | kwhitmire@al.com
Should Alabamians be able to hang the Ten Commandments in public buildings, including schools and courthouses?
Rep. DuWayne Bridges, R-Valley, wants to give Alabamians an opportunity to decide at the ballot box, and this week he again introduced a bill to send an amendment of the Alabama Constitution to voters.
The debate over the bill was, to say the least, as interesting as it was meandering.
Here are a few things I learned about morality and Biblical history while listening to the debate.
- School shootings, patricide and matricide are due to the Ten Commandments not being displayed in schools and other government buildings. – Rep. Bridges.
- "Jesus himself said feed those who are hungry, clothe those who are nekkid." – Rep. Darrio Melton, D-Selma.
- People who believe in Mohammed practice "Muslimism." – Rep. James Buskey, D-Mobile.
more
http://blog.al.com/wire/2014/02/things_i_learned_during_the_al.html
With a canoe and a camera, AP journalists told story of coal ash spill
by Kristen Hare
After a long day of reporting, Michael Biesecker sat by himself at a table at Outback Steakhouse in Danville, Va.
“And they brought me a big glass of water,” said Biesecker, a reporter with the Associated Press, in a phone interview with Poynter. “And I knew the water was drawn and treated from the river, and everyone around me was drinking that water.”
That water, he discovered earlier that day, was thick and dirty with toxic coal ash stored in a coal ash pond that had leaked into the Dan River. Biesecker asked the waitress if she’d heard of the spill. She hadn’t. Hardly anyone had.
I need to tell people what’s going on here, he thought. So he wrote fast at that table, with a salad, a baked potato and a bottle of water nearby.
more
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/240813/with-a-canoe-and-a-camera-ap-journalists-told-story-of-coal-ash-spill/
Apple to Arizona: Anti-gay bill puts Mesa sapphire plant at risk
Source: CNN
Apple (AAPL) confirmed Monday that it has urged Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to veto a bill that would allow business owners with strongly held religious beliefs to deny service to gays and lesbians.
Since the Arizona statehouse passed the measure last Thursday, Gov. Brewer has faced growing pressure to kill the bill that opponents characterize as "state-sanctioned discrimination."
Three state senators who voted for the bill are now asking her to veto it. So are Arizona's two U.S. Senators: John McCain and Jeff Flake, both Republicans. American Airlines (AAL) and Marriott (MAR) have warned that an anti-gay law could be bad for business.
We don't know who at Apple phoned the Governor, or what exactly was said. But it was only last November that Tim Cook announced that Apple was building a sapphire glass plant in Mesa, AZ, that would bring 2,000 new jobs to the state.
Read more: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/25/apple-arizona-gay-discrimination/
The star cluster Messier 7 (Big Space Pic)
A new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the bright star cluster Messier 7. Easily spotted with the naked eye close to the tail of the constellation of Scorpius, it is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars in the sky — making it an important astronomical research target.
Messier 7, also known as NGC 6475, is a brilliant cluster of about 100 stars located some 800 light-years from Earth. In this new picture from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope it stands out against a very rich background of hundreds of thousands of fainter stars, in the direction of the centre of the Milky Way.
At about 200 million years old, Messier 7 is a typical middle-aged open cluster, spanning a region of space about 25 light-years across. As they age, the brightest stars in the picture — a population of up to a tenth of the total stars in the cluster — will violently explode as supernovae. Looking further into the future, the remaining faint stars, which are much more numerous, will slowly drift apart until they become no longer recognisable as a cluster.
Open star clusters like Messier 7 are groups of stars born at almost the same time and place, from large cosmic clouds of gas and dust in their host galaxy. These groups of stars are of great interest to scientists, because the stars in them have about the same age and chemical composition. This makes them invaluable for studying stellar structure and evolution.
An interesting feature in this image is that, although densely populated with stars, the background is not uniform and is noticeably streaked with dust. This is most likely to be just a chance alignment of the cluster and the dust clouds. Although it is tempting to speculate that these dark shreds are the remnants of the cloud from which the cluster formed, the Milky Way will have made nearly one full rotation during the life of this star cluster, with a lot of reorganisation of the stars and dust as a result. So the dust and gas from which Messier 7 formed, and the star cluster itself, will have gone their separate ways long ago.
more
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1406/
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