There are usually strict requirements in place if you want to return a hunting license or tag close to the season: an extreme medical diagnoses, a death in the immediate family, “or something like jury duty,” said Travis Duncan with Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
But 2020’s historic wildfire season peaked unseasonably late, and the October flames of the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome firescollided with hunting season. That, combined with the ongoing challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, led Colorado Parks and Wildlife to accept more than 12,000 hunting refunds with a total revenue loss of $2.8 million.
“It’s been a difficult year, and we really had to focus on, from our leadership team, on being compassionate and supportive of our customers as they navigated the difficult times…
Astronomers discovered a rare ‘Super-Earth,’ a hot, rocky exoplanet orbiting one of the oldest stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.Astronomers discovered a rare ‘Super-Earth,’ a hot, rocky exoplanet orbiting one of the oldest stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
UK’s Johnson Takes Stand Against ‘Cruel’ Japanese Whaling: the TelegraphMore
FILE PHOTO: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures at a media briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in Downing Street, London, Britain January 15, 2021. Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire/Pool via REUTERS/File PhotoREUTERS
(REUTERS) – BRITISH Prime Minister Boris Johnson is taking a stand against “cruel” Japanese whaling, The Telegraph newspaper said on Friday, after a minke whale became caught in fishing nets for 19 days before being killed by fishermen this week,
Drone footage of the trapped whale in the port of Taiji captured the world’s attention and received flak from animal rights activists and environmentalists across the world.Recommended VideosPowered by AnyClipTrump Warns Roy Moore Not to Run for Senate in Alabama.
“At a time when we are already seeing the tragic and irreversible destruction of our natural world, with the sea increasingly pumped full of plastics and climate change threatening entire ecosystems, it is more important than ever to take a stand against the cruel practice of whaling,” Johnson told the newspaper.
The Foreign Office is also raising the issue with counterparts in Japan, the report added.
A Japanese fleet caught whales in 2019 in the country’s first commercial hunt in more than three decades, a move that aroused global condemnation.
Taiji is known for its annual dolphin hunt.
(Reporting by Aishwarya Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Nick Macfie)
by:Chris CountsPosted:Jan 18, 2021 / 11:50 AM CST/Updated:Jan 18, 2021 / 11:50 AM CST
YELL COUNTY, Ark. (KARK) – Early Sunday morning Sheriff’s Deputies were able to locate a hunter in Carden Bottoms who later died from a gunshot wound.
Investigators located 20-year-old Jared James Sykes and were able to transport him to Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center, but he succumbed to his injuries.
His body has been sent to the State Medical Examiner for an official determination of the cause and manner of death.
Mink producers considered for Wisconsin’s next round of COVID-19 vaccines.(Photo: Kaitlyn Riley)
A state subcommittee is recommending that those working on Wisconsin mink farms be included in the next phase of COVID-19 vaccination distribution along with those over 70,non-EMS first responders, education and childcare workers, and non-frontline health care personnel – all deemed asfront line essential workersbased on the essential nature of their jobs, difficulty identifying trained replacements, or unique circumstances of employment.
The State Disaster Medical Advisory Committee (SDMAC) established the subcommittee tasked with creating guidance for the Department of Health Services (DHS) prioritizing the allocation of the limited number of vaccine doses. Government and health care bodies must ration the available vaccines until production and distribution of the vaccine ramps up.
I recently posted about fireworks and the devastation they cause, illustrating the post with a tragic picture of countless dead birds on a city street following new year fireworks.
It is well documented that fireworks terrify all the living individuals in their vicinity. Those who share their homes with dogs or cats are, for the most part, acutely aware of this and there’s even a lucrative trade in consumer items to soothe and calm nonhuman family members who experience the sickening panic caused by fireworks. However these are far from being the only species affected. For some creatures who live outdoors, the terror is so extreme that their panicking hearts simply fail. Others fly frantically into obstacles, killing or injuring themselves, while yet others bolt in mindless panic, frequently becoming lost, injured or killed.
Besides being antisocial and causing distress and anxiety to many humans, fireworks are an extreme form…
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)Getty Images
Five years ago this month, Ammon Bundy led a 41-day armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge after protesting the return to federal prison of two Oregon ranchers convicted of setting fire to public land.
Bundy was acquitted of all charges after his arrest on allegations of conspiracy and impeding federal employees through intimidation, threat or force.
Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called the 2016 refuge occupation a “dress rehearsal for what we saw at the Capitol.” The center, based in Denver, advocates for land and water conservation in the West.
“The extremist ideologies and tactics that led to the violent occupation of public lands in Oregon are the same ideologies that President Trump has stoked among his supporters,” she said in a statement Thursday.
“You can draw a straight line from the Bundy Ranch standoff and Malheur takeover to the Trump insurrection in Washington,” she said.
Before Malheur, Ammon Bundy, father Cliven Bundy and brother Ryan Bundy were accused of rallying militia members and armed supporters to stop federal officers in April 2014from impounding Bundy Ranch cattle in Nevada. Cliven Bundy owed more than $1 millionin grazing fees and penalties that he refused to pay for two decades after federal authorities moved to limit his cattle’s access to public land. Their federal prosecution in Nevada was dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct.
The post Wednesday read:“You can’t clean the swamp by standing off at a distance and smelling it. At Bundy Ranch we had a job to do, go get it done, and We the People went forward and finished the job.”
It also praised Donald Trump: “Today President Trump had hundreds of thousands of people and he pointed the way – pointed towards congress and nodded his head go get the job done. We the People did clear the chambers of Congress and 100,000 should have spent the night in the halls and 100,000 should have protected them. Trump blew his trump of retreat and the sun goes down.”
Facebook post on Bundy Ranch page, Jan. 6, 2020, with Cliven D. Bundy as the author.
What happened in Washington, D.C., was just the latest in violent clashes and standoffs by right-wing extremist groups,according to watchdog organizations.
Erik Molvar, executive director of the advocacy group Western Watersheds Project, said the mob mayhem in Washington was a “direct result of a growing movement of domestic terrorists within the United States, paired with a systematic failure by law enforcement to bring them to justice.”
The nonprofit conservation group has sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to challenge the return of a grazing permit to the Oregon ranchers whose prison sentences sparked the refuge occupation. Trump administration pardoned father Dwight Hammond Jr. and son Steven Hammond in 2018.
Ammon Bundy, reached Thursday, said he was in the mountains and wasn’t tracking what occurred at the Capitol, yet Bundy had urged people to attend Thursday’s rally in Washington, D.C. and “stand for a constitutional republic” through a video posted last month by a group he’s helped form called People’s Right. “Don’t wear a mask and stand for freedom,” he urged on the video.https://a910d1429c8ef5b31cae4269acb3f73f.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“It’s dangerous to all of us forofficials in a government capacity to claim rights that belong to the individual, whether it’s travel, what you wear over your face, or when you can go to church,” said Bundy, who has been protesting coronavirus emergency safeguards. “I also don’t believe a republican representative form of government should make decisions without public oversight and without the participation of the people.”
Greg Magarian, a law professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis., said there’s a significant difference between what the nation witnessed in Washington this week and racial and social justice protests in the last year.
“When a group violently attacks other people or attacks a public place in a way that puts other people’s lives or safety in jeopardy, that’s a severe crime. It’s a violent riot, an attack,” he wrote Thursday for an in-house university publication. “When a group violently attacks a government institution in an effort to change the lawful governmental order, that’s insurrection. It’s terrorism.”
As other examples of insurrection, he cited the Malheur takeover, the militia takeover of the Michigan state Capitol in April and the militia-backed shutdown of Oregon’s Capitol in June 2019.
In an interview Thursday, Magarian also discussed similarities between the Malheur refuge occupation and the siege of the U.S. Capitol.
“These are both instances where people essentially trespassed on federal property, overwhelmed law enforcement and seized federal institutions by force,” he said.
Clayvin Herrera poses for a picture on the plaza of the Supreme Court, Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019, in Washington. The U.S. Supreme is reviewing a case in which Clayvin Herrera, a Crow tribal member and former tribal game warden from Montana, is asserting his right under a 150-year-old treaty with the U.S. government to hunt elk in the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming.Associated Press
A39-year-old man denied allegations in Yellowstone County District Court Friday that he had possessed child pornography.
Clayvin Bryant Herrera pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual abuse of children. Prosecutors allege he had hundreds of images of child pornography on his cell phone that were located during a drug investigation.
Herrera was also arraigned Friday on charges of criminal possession of dangerous drugs, strangulation of a partner or family member…
The Sheriff’s Office says the man has serious, but non-life-threatening injuries
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – A man is recovering following a hunting accident on Thursday.
The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office says it happened around 6 p.m. in the area of 176th and Havelock in northeastern Lancaster County.
Deputies said two men, a 41-year-old and an 18-year-old, were about to leave after deer hunting when the 41-year-old was putting the rifle in the backseat of the truck.
LSO said the firearm discharged and went through the seat and hit the 18-year-old in the leg.ADVERTISEMENT
Deputies arrived and applied a tourniquet to the teen, before volunteer firefighters arrived and transported him to a Lincoln hospital.
LSO says the man underwent surgery for serious, but non-life-threatening injuries. He is expected to survive.
We’re told there will not be any criminal charges.
Health experts say you should avoid optional trips whenever you can. You probably need a better mask, too.By Julia Belluz@juliaoftoronto Updated Jan 15, 2021, 3:34pm EST
Say goodbye to cloth masks. Say hello to tight-fitting surgical masks or even N95s.
Recent developments in the Covid-19 pandemic have exposed a grim reality: If we keep doing what we’re doing now to prevent infections, we’re screwed. Well, even more screwed.
That’s because the virus appears to be getting even better at infecting us. Since at least December, new, more contagious variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 have been outcompeting earlier versions of the virus in countries as far and wide as Brazil, the UK, and South Africa.
The advantage the new variants carry seems to be that in any given situation where people are gathered, they’ll infect more people — an estimated 30 to 70 percent more in the case of the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in Britain, which has now been identified in 50 countries.
B.1.1.7 is already believed to be circulating at low levels across the US. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported it has been detected in 10 states and is expected to become the most prevalent variant by March. And for a preview of what might come, look at how cases surged in the UK and nearby countries where this variant gained a foothold:
Even after a lockdown in the UK in November, the virus ripped through the population, overwhelming hospitals and forcing the government to implement even stricter stay-at-home orders by January.
While these variants haven’t been shown to be more deadly, a more transmissible virus is actually worse in many ways than a more lethal one. Cases snowball at a faster rate, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said on a recent press call. With a 50 percent rise in infectiousness, for example, “in less than two weeks, you get twice the number of cases,” Lipsitch said. “And in a month or so, you have four, five times as many cases. But that’s very approximate.” The case growth could be even more dramatic, as Vox’s Brian Resnick reported.
The implication is clear: If we want the pandemic to end as fast as possible, we need to pump the brakes right now. And we don’t have to wait for the vaccines to slow the spread of the virus. We simply need to do what we’ve been doing all along to prevent infections, just much, much better. At an individual level, that means avoiding optional gatherings with other people — even grocery trips — whenever possible, or cutting them very short.
“Shopping for five minutes in the grocery store is a lot better — six times better — than shopping for 30 minutes,” said Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since the odds of becoming infected rise the longer you’re exposed. “Picking up groceries at the curbside is even better, and having them delivered is even better still.”(If you’re able to get groceries delivered or pick up curbside, it will also help reduce the risk for those who can’t.)
It’s time to avoid other people, even at the grocery store (if possible)
We know the virus can’t spread if we keep our distance from other people. But with the new variants, it might be even easier to catch.
The B.1.1.7 variant, for example, may generate a higher viral load in the respiratory tract of people who are infected, causing them to spew particles laden with even more virus into the air. Or the variant’sspike protein — the thorny edges on the surface that fit into the receptor in our cells — may be even “stickier,” meaning it’s even more effective at entering human cells.
We still don’t know the exact reason the virus variants appear to be more contagious, University of Utah evolutionary virologist Stephen Goldstein told Vox, but we don’t have to wait for the answer. “The best protection still remains avoiding contact with other people indoors, especially for a sustained period of time,” he said. In other words, if you must meet others, a few minutes is much better than an hour or a few hours.
“Maybe if I’m in New Zealand [where new virus cases have mostly hovered below 20 per day for months], I can go get a haircut,” said Julie Swann, a professor at North Carolina State University who has studied Covid-19 mask effectiveness. “But I would not go in person to get a haircut if there’s a virus that’s 50 percent more transmissible spreading where I live.”
Number of acute respiratory infection ARI incidents by institution, UK.
Concerns about going for a walk or run even in this scary new context are misplaced, experts say. “There seems to be a bit of a fuss about needing to be more wary of transmission outdoors, but I don’t know where that has come from,” saidRichard Lessells, a University of KwaZulu-Natal infectious disease specialist in Durban, South Africa. “Based on the evidence, we still think risk of transmission outdoors is very substantially less than indoors, and there’s no reason to believe the new variants change that equation substantially.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1348771268460310529&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F22220301%2Fcovid-spread-new-strain-variants-safe-grocery-store-n95-masks-vaccine&siteScreenName=voxdotcom&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px
Get a better mask
When you do have to be around other people, use a mask — but not just any mask. The other lesson of the new variants, Frieden told Vox, is that we need to get better at masking.
“The fact that [the variants] are so infectious suggests to me having a better mask is a good idea,” Frieden said. When it comes to avoiding an infection, “a surgical mask is better than a cloth mask, a tight-fitting surgical mask is better than a loose-fitting mask, and an N95 is better than a surgical mask.”
Most Americans, however, still rely on cloth masks. Part of the problem is that the CDC continues to recommend cloth masks — what should have been a stopgap measure while the government procured better, medical-grade masks for citizens, Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard pointed out in the Atlantic.
This is a failure at a time when other countries around the world have managed to follow the evidence and get high-quality face coverings to people. It’s also an opportunity for the Biden administration to show leadership and learn from other countries.
In Austria, for example, the government is distributing FFP2 masks — the European equivalent of N95s — to citizens over the age of 65. In Taiwan, every citizen has access to new high-quality masks every week following the government’s manufacturing scale-up, Tufekci and Howard report. In Bavaria, Germany, the government has also boosted its mask supply and is mandating FFP2 masks on public transit and in stores.
If you can’t afford or access a higher-quality mask, Swann said, tight, well-fitting (cover that nose and mouth!) homemade masks with multiple layers are better than single-layer cloth masks. Similarly, double masking is better than single masking. And, of course, any mask is still better than no mask.
“But the best protection still remains avoiding contact with other people indoors, especially for a sustained period of time,” Goldstein added. “Masks are not 100 percent effective. Staying away from people is 100 percent effective.”
People of color tend to be overrepresented in these groups — but there’s no biological reason they’re more likely to get sick and die from the virus. Simply put: They tend to work jobs that take them outside the home and into close contact with other people, live in crowded environments ideal for coronavirus contagion, or both.
So policies like free testing, paid isolation, hazard pay, and paid sick leave are more important than ever — and the federal government also has a role to play in setting standards and carrying out inspections to ensure safety for workers. This is especially true in congregate living settings, such as long-term care facilities and prisons, where the virus is known to spread easily.
Most countries aren’t moving as quickly as Israel, and governments need to catch up in the race against the virus. Because if we continue doing everything the same way we’vebeen doing at earlier stages of the pandemic, we’re going to help the virus get even better, and “the trajectory can get worse with a more transmissible variant,” Goldstein said. At a time when nearly 5,000 Americans are dying of the virus each day, anything worse is hard to fathom. But the point is: the situation doesn’t have to deteriorate. Even before governments announce new Covid-19 plans and programs and vaccines are injected into every possible arm, we can change the trajectory of the pandemic.
CONNECT
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Exposing the Big Game 