1of5FILE – This Feb. 20, 2019 file photo, shows a foothold trap intended for bobcats, set by licensed trapper Tom Fisher, on the outskirts of Tierra Amarilla, N.M. It will be illegal to use wildlife traps, snares and poison on public lands across New Mexico under a ban that takes effect Friday, April 1, 2022. New Mexico is joining a handful of Western states that limit trapping on public lands.Morgan Lee/AP
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — It will be illegal to use wildlife traps, snares and poison on public lands across New Mexico under a ban that takes effect Friday.
New Mexico is joining a handful of Western states that have limited trapping on public lands, with supporters saying the move will help protect endangered species such as the Mexican gray wolf and prevent household pets from walking into…
UN atomic watchdog investigates claims Russian troops left after high doses of radiation. Plus, Trump may face court date thanks to reggae singer lawsuit.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it could not confirm the claims by the Ukrainian state power company Energoatom and was seeking an independent assessment. It will send its first “assistance and support mission” to Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, in the next few days.
Energoatom said the Russians dug trenches in the forest inside the exclusion zone at the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, and that the troops “panicked at the first sign of illness” that “showed up very quickly” and began preparing to leave.
Meanwhile, Energoatom also said the Russian side had formally agreed to hand back to Ukraine the responsibility for protecting Chernobyl. It shared the scan of a document signed by people it identified as a senior staff member at Chernobyl and the Russian military official assigned to guarding Chernobyl.
What is Chernobyl? The plant is the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986. Staff continue to oversee the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel and supervise the concrete-encased remains of the reactor that exploded.
When did Russia take control of Chernobyl? Russian troops seized the nuclear plant soon after the 24 February invasion. There have been concerns over the past month about power cuts and fighting making staff shift rotations difficult.
What claims is the UN agency likely to investigate? Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk claimed Russian troops dug trenches in the forest and were exposed to radiation. Some reports suggest soldiers are being sent to a special medical facility in Belarus after driving tanks through the “dead zone” around the nuclear plant, kicking up radioactive dust. (These claims are unverified.)
Mariupol officials say Russians are blocking aid reaching besieged Ukraine city
People walk past a destroyed apartment building in Mariupol. Photograph: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
An aide to the mayor of Mariupol has said the besieged southern Ukrainian city remains closed for anyone trying to enter and is “very dangerous” for anyone trying to leave.
Petro Andryushchenko said Russian forces have been preventing even the smallest amount of humanitarian supplies reaching trapped residents.
A convoy of buses that set out for Mariupol did not reach the city, Ukrainian officials said last night. Russia had promised a limited ceasefire along the route from Mariupol to the Ukraine-held city of Zaporizhzhia.
Repeated efforts to set up humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of up to 170,000 people who remain in Mariupol, which has suffered four weeks of bombardment and dwindling supplies, have failed. Ukraine has accused Russian forces of shelling supposedly safe routes outside of several fighting hotspots, claims that Moscow denies.
Meanwhile, insiders in the UK intelligence agency are divided over GCHQ boss Jeremy Fleming’s strategy of leaking intelligence, my colleague Dan Sabbagh reports. Fleming revealed details such as Russian forces “accidentally shooting down their own aircraft”, sparking debate among spy insiders over the strategy.
Trump may face day in court thanks to lawsuit from reggae singer Eddy Grant
The Guyanese-British reggae musician Eddy Grant claims copyright infringement and seeks $300,000 in damages. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Bott/AP
The reggae singer Eddy Grant may succeed where the attorney general of New York state and other powerful figures have struggled – by forcing Donald Trump to answer questions under oath in a legal proceeding.
Grant sued the former president and his campaign over the use of his song Electric Avenue in an ad in 2020.
In the ad, Grant’s song plays over an animation of Joe Biden traveling slowly in a handcar, after a Trump campaign train passes at high speed. Remarks from Biden are also heard. Trump has failed to have the suit dismissed and claims it was fair use under a satire exemption.
Who is Eddy Grant? A 74-year-old Guyanese-British reggae musician. The song Electric Avenue was released in 1982.
How much is Grant seeking in damages? $300,000 for copyright infringement.
How many times has the video been viewed? More than 13.7m times, the lawsuit claims.
In other news …
Amazon Labor Union members Mitch Israel and Angelika Maldonado hug after gathering to watch the NLRB vote count to unionize Amazon workers in Brooklyn. Photograph: Caitlin Ochs/Reuters
A Palestinian baby has died after her treatment was delayed by Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Fatima al-Masri, a 19-month-old with a hole in her heart, waited five months for Israel to issue a permit allowing her to travel for medical treatment.
Amazon workers in New York are close to voting to form a union today. It represents a major win for labor activists who have failed in previous efforts to organize at the tech giant, which is the second largest private employer in the US. “Workers here have shown what is possible,” said one activist.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson has U-turned on his U-turn to ban LGBT conversion therapy. On Thursday, reports said Johnson intended to block planned legislation banning LGBT conversion therapy. But he backed down after a furious response and decided to move ahead to outlaw the practices.
H&M has pledged to end shopfloor sexual violence in India after a garment worker was murdered by her supervisor. The company signed a legally binding agreement with a major Indian clothing supplier. Last January, Jeyasre Kathiravel was found dead after her shift, with her supervisor reportedly confessing to the murder and awaiting trail.
LA police offered to arrest actor Will Smith for slapping presenter Chris Rock at the Academy Awards, the ceremony producer Will Packer said. But authorities took no action because Rock declined to press charges.
Stat of the day: more than 9,500 Indigenous people listed missing in 2021
Meskee Yatsayte of Gallup (left), and Vangie Randall-Shorty of Farmington hold signs to bring awareness to missing and murdered Native Americans in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 11 October 2021. Photograph: Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Journal/Albuquerque Journal/ZUMA/REX/Shutterstock
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In 2021, the National Crime Information Center listed more than 9,500 Indigenous people as missing, with 1,554 of those cases still active by the end of the year. One year after the Department of the Interior announced it was launching a new investigative unit to prioritize the crisis of missing and murdered Native Americans, at least nine Indigenous families have watched jurisdictional issues and miscommunication hamper efforts by the unit to investigate their relatives’ cases, or been met with months of silence.
Don’t miss this: ‘I’ve hugged 500,000 people around the world’
David Sylvester high-fives a passerby in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lives. Photograph: Kyle Kielinski/Kyle & Linette Kielinski
“I carry a clicker to count the number of people I’ve hugged – my record is 1,300 in a day, at a retail convention in Las Vegas – and choose cities where I hope I’ll be welcomed,” says David Sylvester. “On 12 September 2001, I learned that one of my closest childhood friends had died in the World Trade Center. The grief was so awful, I was determined to channel it into something with purpose.”
Climate check: Global UN-affiliated seabed regulator accused of ‘reckless’ failings over deep-sea mining
Caleb Linck holds an external scope camera displaying the image from his stepson Jade Harlow’s rifle sights. Harlow is blind, and Linck serves as his hunting companion, using the external display to guide Harlow to his target. (Courtesy of Rebecca Linck)
BOISE – Crouched in the bed of his stepdad’s truck, Jade Harlow steadied himself, waiting for the right moment to take his shot. Caleb Linck, Harlow’s stepdad, was beside him watching on a 5-inch screen as the crosshairs of Harlow’s rifle hovered over a white-tailed doe.
“Fire,” Linck whispered. A split-second later, a gunshot cracked through the silence. “We got her,” Linck said.
It was Harlow’s first time hunting since he was blinded in a firearm accident in 2018, and the 16-year-old beamed with excitement and pride. His mother, Rebecca Linck, recorded the entire experience…
TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa police arrested Dejuan Ratliffe early Thursday morning after they say he was found carrying two hunting-style rifles near Tulsa International Airport (TIA).
Lieutenant Jamie Kirby tells us Ratliffe was involved in a car crash on Highway 11 near the Airport Terminal exit before he was found carrying the two rifles.
While heading to the crash, officers reportedly got another call about a man carrying two weapons near the airport.
Kirby says they used the TPD helicopter to track Ratliffe down. When they found him, Kirby says he appeared to be “pretty intoxicated.”
potential to recombine with human influenza A viruses and increase transmissibility among humans. If these avian viruses evolve to efficiently transmit among humans, the world could face a pandemic with “potentially high rates of illness and death worldwide,” according to the CDC.
potential to recombine with human influenza A viruses and increase transmissibility among humans. If these avian viruses evolve to efficiently transmit among humans, the world could face a pandemic with “potentially high rates of illness and death worldwide,” according to the CDC.
The bird flu outbreak affecting poultry farms across the U.S. isn’t a cause for concern just yet, but disease surveillance specialists are doing their best to stop the spread and prevent any human cases, experts said.
During this wave of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, the first outbreak in a commercial flock occurred among turkeys in Indiana inearly February, and since then 18 states have reported infections…
This is CNBC’s live blog tracking Thursday’s developments on the war in Ukraine. See below for the latest updates.
Russian forces are continuing to hold their positions and carry out shelling strikes around Kyiv, according to British intelligence, despite promises from Moscow this week to scale back its military activity near the Ukrainian capital.
The head of the U.K.’s intelligence and security agency said in a speech Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “massively misjudged” the situation in Ukraine, and that the Russian leader’s advisors were afraid to tell him the truth about what was happening on the ground.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Thursday that Russia had agreed to allow a humanitarian corridor to open in the besieged city of Mariupol, which has been largely destroyed by Russian shelling and is facing a severe humanitarian crisis.
President Joe Biden has ordered the release of up 1 million barrels of oil per day from the strategic petroleum reserve for the next six months in a bid to control prices that have spiked since the US and its allies imposed strict sanctions on Russia.
The announcement comes after both the White House and the Pentagon said that they believeVladimir Putinis being misinformed about progress in the war by his senior advisers and warned that Russian troops being pulled back from areas near Kyiv may just be being repositioned for further fighting.
A massive coronal mass ejection erupting from the sun in 2017. (Image credit: NASA)
The dazzling northern lights could light up the skies as far south as the northern United States after the detection of 17 solar eruptions blasting from a single sunspot, two of which are headed straight to Earth.
The two Earth-directed eruptions have merged into a “cannibal coronal mass ejection” and are barreling toward us at 1,881,263 mph (3,027,599 km/h). When it crashes into the Earth’s magnetic field, beginning from the night of March 30 through to April 1, the result will be a powerful G3 geomagnetic storm, according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). G3 storms are classified as strong geomagnetic storms, meaning that the oncoming sun blast could bring the aurora as south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon.
The sunspot, called AR2975, has been shooting out flares of electrically charged particles from the sun’s plasma soup since Monday (March 28). Sunspots are areas on the sun’s surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares, or explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
Cannibal coronal mass ejections happen when fast-moving solar eruptions overtake earlier eruptions in the same region of space, sweeping up charged particles to form a giant, combined wavefront that triggers a powerful geomagnetic storm.
The “frenzy” of solar flares meant that “at least two full-halo [Earth striking] CMEs emerged from the chaos,” SpaceWeather.com wrote of the event. The second CME is expected to overtake and “cannibalize” the first before hitting Earth’s magnetic field at around 11 p.m. ET time on March 30.
CME’s usually take around 15 to 18 hours to reach Earth, according to the SWPC. When they do, the Earth’s magnetic field gets compressed slightly by the waves of highly energetic particles, which ripple down magnetic field lines and agitate molecules in the atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light to create colorful auroras in the night sky.
Sun Outburst Goes “Cannibal”
The sun blasted a cannibal coronal mass ejection! An M1-class solar flare on Nov. 2, 2021 generated a fast-moving cannibal coronal mass ejection.
The energy from the storm is expected to be harmlessly absorbed by our magnetic field, but large solar storms still have the potential to wreak havoc. G3 storms can cause “intermittent satellite navigation and low-frequency radio navigation problems,” according to SWPC. A recent storm in February sent 40 Starlink satellites tumbling back to Earth, Live Science previously reported, and scientists have warned that an even larger one could have the potential to cripple the internet across the globe.
Scientists think that the largest ever solar storm witnessed during contemporary history was the 1859 Carrington Event, which carried roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into the Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles fried telegram systems all over the world and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean. If a similar event happened today, it would cause trillions of dollars in damage and widespread blackouts, much like the solar storm which caused the 1989 Quebec blackout, according to scientists.
The desert mule deer is a common sight in the Trans-Pecos region of west Texas, but when wildlife biologists conducted surveys recently, they came across an extremelyuncommonsight.
In fact, it was what they called “the rarest of rare” animals.
What the Texas Parks and Wildlife—Trans-Pecos Wildlife District spotted from a helicopter and captured in video was a melanistic (black hair) mule deer fawn, “a one-in-a-million anomaly.”
“This special deer appears all black except for quick flashes of white fur as it dashes away from the whirring helicopter,” theFort Worth Star-Telegramsaid. “It stands in stark contrast to the older, larger mule deer running ahead of it, sporting the typical brown and white coloration.”
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