LONDON — The U.K. broke its record for the hottest day ever on Tuesday as a heat wave continues to scorch Europe.
The heat wave that settled over southern Europe last week moved north, bringing with it boiling temperatures that are breaking records and causing a national emergency in the U.K.
A movie theater marquee in London suggests an escape from extreme temps as the U.K. hit its hottest day on record on Tuesday. (Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images)
According to provisional figures,temperatures of 40.2°C (104.4°F) were documented at Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport, in the south of England, surpassing the previous record of 38.7°C (101.7°F) in 2019.
Putting the boiling temperatures into a “global perspective,”meteorologist Ben Nollsaid the highest forecast temperature in Britain, predicted to be 41°C (106°F), “would be hotter than 98.8%…
A team of Moscow veterinarians has been dispatched to the Russian Far North to save a polar bear with a can of condensed milk stuck in its mouth, Russia’s environmental watchdog said Wednesday.
The exhausted young polar bear was spotted near Dixon, Russia’s northernmost permanent settlement.
“Veterinarians from Moscow are flying to help the exhausted animal,” Rosprirodnadzor said in a statement.
Rosprirodnazor head Svetlana Rodionova said the animal will have to be tranquilized for the rescue team to remove the can from its mouth, according to the Fontanka news website.
Rodionova’s social media followers blamed local workers for throwing tin cans of condensed milk and canned food at the bears “for fun,” the outlet reported.
Russian scientists have warned that polar bears are being forced to adapt to a land-based diet as they lose their Arctic ice habitat to climate change.
A rising number of encounters between polar bears and humans have been recorded in the Russian Far North in recent years.
With a global population of up to 30,000, polar bears are classified as vulnerable and endangered by the World Wildlife Federation and Russia’s Red Book.
With temperature records being smashed in parts of the United Kingdom and France, Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, warned that the worst is yet to come.
In his own tweet posted Tuesday, Gore, the former vice president, referenced remarks made Monday by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez when he toured an area of his country dealing with devastating wildfires.
“Climate change kills,” Sánchez told reporters. “It kills people, it kills our ecosystems and biodiversity.”
Like Thunberg, Gore noted that unless human beings take action to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions…
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Russia is laying the groundwork to annex parts of Ukraine, according to U.S. intelligence.
“We’re seeing ample evidence and intelligence and in the public domain that Russia intends to try to annex additional Ukrainian territory,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House.
Kirby that the U.S. observed a similar Russian playbook in 2014 ahead of the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula on the Black Sea.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense has said that Russian forces, having seized the Luhansk province in the Donbas after weeks of intense shelling, are likely to employ the same tactics to seize Donetsk
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WASHINGTON — The White House said Tuesday that it…
A provision tucked into the House version of 2023′s defense budget bill could require the Navy to serve up Beyond Burgers or Gardein at a number of forward bases.
The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2023 would create a pilot program by March 2023 to offer“plant-based protein options”at least two Navy forward operating bases.
The secretary of the Navy would identify at least two forward Navy installations for the pilot effort and would be directed to prioritize bases “where livestock-based protein options may be costly…
Deer stroll across a street on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.(National Institutes of Health)
White-tailed deer, once nearly gone from Chesapeake Bay drainage states, are now so plentiful that they threaten landscape vegetation and human safety. As a result, they are increasingly in the crosshairs of rifle scopes.
Often reluctantly, dozens of communities and state and federal agencies, including the National Park Service, are hiring sharpshooters to reduce deer populations. Their calls to arms are invariably prompted by one or more of these concerns: overbrowsing in natural areas, which decimates native plant species and young trees; collisions between deer and vehicles; tick infestations (deer are the primary hosts of ticks that carry Lyme disease); and damage to gardens and landscaping.
Democratic Reps. Nydia Velazquez, Ilhan Omar, Jackie Speier, Carolyn Maloney, Alma Adams and others march toward the US Supreme Court during a protest Tuesday.Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesCNN—
More than a dozen Democratic members of Congress were among those arrested by Capitol Police on Tuesday afternoon as part of an abortion rights protest in front of the Supreme Court.
Wearing specially made green bandanas with “Won’t Back Down,” they marched from the Capitol to the Court, which has been fenced off for weeks, since shortly after the leak of thedraft decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Within two minutes of their arriving, police began ordering them to “cease and desist.” Instead, they sat on the street, and were one by one led off by officers as they chanted, “The people, united, will never be divided.”
Early on July 6, 2021, Leah Lokan awoke to a 417-pound grizzly bear a few feet from her tent, so close that she heard when the bear “huffed” at her head.
“Bear! Bear!” Lokan yelled, prompting Joe and Kim Cole — two other cyclists camping in the small town of Ovando as they trekked across Montana — to spring from their nearby tent, armed with bear spray and clamoring as much as possible, according to a 26-page report addressed by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s executive body earlier this month.
After scaring it off, Lokan, a 65-year-old visiting from Chico, Calif., moved food out of her tent to a nearby building. She armed herself with a can of bear spray. She declined an offer to stay in a hotel for the night. Then, she and the Coles returned to their respective tents.
Lokan’s extra precautionary measures weren’t enough. The bear returned about an hour after the first encounter and mauled her to death.
A year later, wildlife officials said the bear that killed her had developed a “predatory instinct.” Although they couldn’t determine exactly how such an instinct evolved, food and toiletries inside and near Lokan’s tent, as well as the lingering smell of cooked food from July Fourth picnic celebrations, likely played a role.
“While foraging under the cover of darkness in Ovando, perhaps due to a simple movement made by the sleeping victim, or a certain sound made by the victim, the bear reacted,” the committee’s board of review wrote in their Jan. 4 report, which was discussed earlier this month during the executive body’s summer meeting. The 11-member review board included officials from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and the U.S. Forest Service.
Such predatory behavior is rare, even though many of the black and grizzly bears living in the contiguous United States exhibit a certain degree of habituation, officials said in the report. To survive, bears have to be “non-reactive” to people if they want to take advantage of “the rich low elevation habitats that are dominated by humans.”
And most do, despite becoming “mildly food-conditioned” by occasional encounters with unnatural food sources such as garbage, grains and bird feeders, the report said.
Related video: A Wilder View: Why grizzly bears appear on hiking trails
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Lokan had been riding with her sister and their friend in the Tour Divide, an annual bike ride along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, a roughly 2,700-mile span that starts in Alberta, Canada, and ends at the U.S.-Mexico border in Antelope Wells, N.M.
Ovando, a town of fewer than 100 in the western part of the state, is a popular oasis along the ride, according to the report. Thousands of cyclists stop in town during the summer to eat, camp for the night or stay in a hotel.
While Lokan’s sister and friend chose to hole up in a hotel the night of July 5, Lokan opted to camp behind the Brand Bar Museum with the Coles, whom they’d met during their travels. She set up her tent around 7 p.m.
Around that time, the grizzly bear was about 4 miles to the west trying to break into a trailer, according to the committee’s report.
Eight hours later, the bear made its way into Lokan’s camp, huffing at her head and causing her to raise the alarm that would scare it back into the woods.
Lokan tried to make her camp more bear-safe, the report said. Although she moved her snacks and lentils out of the tent into a nearby building, the bags in which she kept her toiletries still smelled of the dried blueberries they’d once contained, investigators said. Moreover, she still had food — beef jerky, trail mix, granola bars, a baked potato — in the saddle bags draped over her bike, which was about 10 feet from her tent.
The makeshift campsite behind the Brand Bar Museum in Ovando, Mont., just hours after a 417-pound grizzly bear mauled 65-year-old camper and cyclist Leah Lokan to death.
Around 4:05 a.m., the Coles were awakened once again. But this time, it wasn’t Lokan’s shouting that roused them but the sound of the bear attacking her. Joe Cole unzipped their tent and roared in an effort to scare it off. His wife joined in by blowing a whistle. Emerging from the tent, the Coles saw the bear “pouncing up and down” on Lokan and her tent. Joe Cole advanced as he doused it with bear spray.
“The bear made eye contact with Joe, then averted its head as they approached closer, turned, and left,” the report states.
Although officials credited Cole’s “aggressive response and action” with once again scaring off the bear, the damage was done. Emergency workers found “no obvious signs of life” while treating Lokan. Officials would later determine that her death was “instantaneous” after the bear broke her neck and severed her spinal cord. The medical examiner noted that she also had severe cuts to her head, neck, shoulders and back.
The grizzly eluded wildlife authorities for days as reports came in of a bear pillaging chicken coops, raiding garbage cans and killing deer. But just after midnight on July 9, agents with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services shot the bear five times, killing it. Subsequent DNA tests confirmed it was the bear that had attacked Lokan.
In their report, officials issued several recommendations for campers in the wake of Lokan’s death. They encouraged people to keep food or anything with a scent, such as toothpaste or lotion, far away from tents; to pitch tents at least 100 feet from where food has been cooked; and not to return if a bear comes near an occupied tent.
Investigators found a nearly empty can of bear spray inside Lokan’s tent and evidence she’d used it during the attack. In the report, officials said Lokan’s family had suggested that manufacturers add whistles to bear-spray cans that would sound when someone pulls the trigger. The noise would serve two purposes: to alert others of danger and further harass the bear.
A Georgia hunter was sentenced Friday in federal court for illegally transporting deer that were illegally taken near North Platte.
Daniel C. Morris, 40, of Monroe, Ga. was sentenced in Lincoln, to 7 years’ probation for violating the Lacey Act – unlawfully transporting wildlife in interstate commerce.He must also pay a $5,000 fine and pay $2,000 restitution, U.S. District Judge John Gerrard said.
In the fall of 2020, Morris traveled to Noble Outdoors with two hunting partners to hunt mule deer during the archery season,Acting U.S. Attorney Steven Russell said.
During the hunt, Morris shot a mule deer buck from the roadway with a Ruger All-American 6.5 Creedmoor rifle provided and directed by Dustin Noble, guide and owner of Noble Outdoors, operating in the North Platte area.
Shooting from the road and using a firearm to take deer during archery hunting season are…
