The Interior Department on Monday announced an expansion of hunting and fishing rights across 2.1 million acres, which it tied to the Biden administration’s lands conservation target.
The announcement applies to a single national fish hatchery and 88 national wildlife refuges, according to an Interior announcement.
“Increasing access to outdoor recreation opportunities is essential to advancing the Administration’s commitment to the conservation stewardship of our public lands,” Interior SecretaryDeb Haalandsaid in a statement. “Responsible hunting and fishing helps to promote healthy wildlife habitats while boosting local recreation economies.”
“Today’s announcement furthers a rich tradition of providing quality outdoor recreation experiences to the American people on our public lands,” Service Principal Deputy Director Martha Williams said…
Activists hold a demonstration marking the delayed COP26 UN climate negotiations on November 13, 2020, in Glasgow, Scotland. The 26th United Nations Climate Change conference was delayed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Darell KingAugust 28, 2021August 28 / Water 2021, 12:23 GMT
Updated 4 hours ago
picture released,Reuterscomment on the photo,
British forces will withdraw from Afghanistan on the last flights from Kabul airport
The British Ministry of Defense said that the last flights of the United Kingdom to evacuate civilians from Afghanistan took off from the airport in the capital, Kabul.
The remaining flights will carry British diplomats and military personnel, according to the ministry.
Earlier, the commander of the British armed forces, General Nick Carter, said that the United Kingdom’s operations to evacuate civilians from Afghanistan would end Saturday.
“It breaks my heart” that they could not save everyone, Carter said, noting that hundreds of Afghans eligible to move to Britain were still stuck in Afghanistan.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said Friday it had evacuated 14,543 people from Kabul since August 13.
A protester against mandates to wear masks amid the coronavirus pandemic is seen in Austin, Texas.Photograph: Sergio Flores/Reuters
AssociatedPressinSanAngelo,TexasSun 29 Aug 2021 11.59 EDT
A man who led efforts in his centralTexascommunity against mask-wearing and other preventative measures during the coronavirus pandemic has died from Covid-19, a month after being admitted to the emergency room.
Caleb Wallace died on Saturday, his wife Jessica Wallace said on a GoFundMe page where she posted updates on his condition, the San Angelo Standard-Times reported.
He was 30 years old and a father of three. His wife is pregnant with their fourth child.
“Caleb has peacefully passed on,” Jessica Wallace wrote. “He will forever live in our hearts and…
A protester against mandates to wear masks amid the coronavirus pandemic is seen in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Sergio Flores/Reuters
Associated Press in San Angelo, TexasSun 29 Aug 2021 11.59 EDT
A man who led efforts in his central Texas community against mask-wearing and other preventative measures during the coronavirus pandemic has died from Covid-19, a month after being admitted to the emergency room.
Caleb Wallace died on Saturday, his wife Jessica Wallace said on a GoFundMe page where she posted updates on his condition, the San Angelo Standard-Times reported.
He was 30 years old and a father of three. His wife is pregnant with their fourth child.
“Caleb has peacefully passed on,” Jessica Wallace wrote. “He will forever live in our hearts and minds.”
On 4 July 2020, Caleb Wallace helped organize The Freedom Rally in San Angelo. People at the event carried signs that criticized the wearing of masks, business closures, the science behind Covid-19 and liberal media.
He also organized a group, The San Angelo Freedom Defenders.
“We are not real happy with the current state of America at the moment,” Wallace said in July 2020.
In April this year, he wrote to the San Angelo school district, demanding it rescind all Covid-19 protocols.
Jessica Wallace told the newspaper her husband began experiencing Covid symptoms on 26 July but refused to get tested or go to the hospital. He instead took high doses of Vitamin C, zinc aspirin and ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine used for livestock that officials have urged people not to take for Covid-19.
He was taken to an emergency room on 30 July. Since 8 August he had been unconscious and on a ventilator.
A day before his death, Jessica Wallace posted that her husband “was an imperfect man but he loved his family and his little girls more than anything”.
“To those who wished him death, I’m sorry his views and opinions hurt you. I prayed he’d come out of this with a new perspective and more appreciation for life. I can’t say much more than that because I can’t speak for him.”
Illustration of a partial Dyson sphere around a star.
Black holes are more than just massive objects that swallow everything around them – they’re also one of the universe’s biggest and most stable energy sources. That would make them invaluable to the type of civilization that needs huge amounts of power, such as a Type II Kardashev civilization. But to harness all of that power, the civilization would have to encircle the entire black hole with something that could capture the power it is emitting.
One potential solution would be a Dyson sphere – a type of stellar mega engineering project that encapsulates an entire star (or, in this case, a black hole) in an artificial sheath that captures all of the energy the object at its center emits. But even if it was able to capture all of the energy the black hole emits, the sphere itself would still suffer from heat loss. And that heat loss would make it visible to us, according to new research published by an international team led by researchers at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.
Obviously, no such structure has yet been detected. Still, the paper proves that it is possible to do so, despite no visible light making it past the sphere’s surface and a black hole’s reputation for being light sinks rather than light sources. To understand how we would detect such a system, first, it would be helpful to understand what that system would be designed to do.
The authors study six different energy sources that a potential Dyson sphere could collect around a black hole. They are the omnipresent Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (which would be washing over the sphere no matter where it was placed), the black hole’s Hawking radiation, its accretion disk, its Bondi accretion, its corona, and its relativistic jets.
Some of these energy sources are much more high-powered than others, with the energy from the black hole’s accretion disk leading the pack in terms of potential energy captures. Other types of energy would require completely different engineering challenges, such as capturing the kinetic energy of the relativistic jets that shoot out from the black hole’s poles. Size obviously plays a large factor in how much energy these black holes emit. The authors primarily focus on stellar-mass black holes as a good point of comparison against other potential energy sources. At that size, the accretion disk alone would provide hundreds of times the energy output of a main-sequence star.
It would be impossible to build a Dyson sphere around any object that size with current known materials. But the type of civilization that would be interested in taking on such an engineering challenge would most likely have much stronger materials than we do today. Alternatively, they could work with known materials to create a Dyson Swarm or Dyson Bubble, which doesn’t require as much material strength but does lose some of the energy that a complete sphere would capture, and adds multiple layers of complexity when coordinating orbital paths and other factors. Any such structure would have to be outside the accretion disk to get the full benefit from the energy the black hole emits.
Even a single sphere around a single stellar-mass black hole would be enough to push any civilization that created it into Type II territory, giving it a level of power output unimaginable with current technology. But even such a potent civilization most likely won’t be able to bend the laws of physics. No matter the power level, some of it will be lost to heat.
To astronomers, heat is simply another form of light – infrared, to be exact. And according to the researchers, the heat emitted by a Dyson sphere around a black hole should be detectable by our current crop of telescopes, such as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to a distance of about 10kpc at least. That’s about 1/3 of the distance across the entire Milky Way. No matter how close they were, they wouldn’t appear like traditional stars but could be detectable using the radial velocity method commonly used to find exoplanets.
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, one of the telescopes that could find a potential Dyson sphere around a black hole. Credit: SDSS Team, Fermilab Visual Media Services
While this is useful theoretical work, there certainly hasn’t been any evidence of any such structure existing yet – Fermi’s Paradox still holds. But given all the data that we’re already collecting these telescopes, it might be interesting to scan through them one more time to check if there happens to be heat emanating from a place where it wouldn’t be expected. It would be worth the time to at least look for what could be such a fundamentally ground-breaking discovery.
Reference: “A Dyson Sphere around a black hole” by Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, Tomotsugu Goto, Tetsuya Hashimoto, Daryl Joe D. Santos, Alvina Y. L. On, Ece Kilerci-Eser, Yi Hang Valerie Wong, Seong Jin Kim, Cossas K.-W. Wu, Simon C.-C. Ho and Ting-Yi Lu, 29 June 2021, Astrophysics > High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena.
Officials from the Marin County Department of Public Health initiated an investigation into the classroom outbreak on May 26, three days after the teacher reported testing positive for Covid-19. The teacher, who initially attributed symptoms to allergies, was one of only two staff members that had not been vaccinated at the elementary school.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
Among the teacher’s 24 students, 22 who were ineligible for vaccination because of age were tested. Twelve tested positive for the virus, according to the report, written by county health officials and experts at the University of California’s Berkeley, Davis and Santa Cruz campuses.
Children under 1
2 are ineligible for vaccination, meaning that their safety is dependent on others adults to get vaccinated to minimize exposure to the virus, according to the CDC.
Experts concluded that the attack rate in the affected classroom was 50 percent, but the students seating closest to the teacher’s desk faced an increased risk of infection. The attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80 percent, the CDC reported.
A majority of the students sitting in the first two rows of the classroom contracted the virus, while a minority of those sitting at the back of the class were infected. The teacher occasionally read aloud to students while unmasked, despite school requirements to mask while indoors, according to the report.
Four parents of children at the school were later infected in the outbreak, according to the report. Of the infected parents, only one was unvaccinated. The vaccinated experienced symptoms including fever, chills, cough, headache and loss of smell.
Additionally, six students from a different grade also tested positive for Covid-19 after one student hosted a sleepover with two other students from the same class, the CDC reported. All students infected in this classroom were also ineligible for vaccination due to age.
Certain specimen evidence gathered throughout the investigation suggests “that infections occurring in the two grades likely were part of the same outbreak.”
A total of 26 elementary school students and their contacts got infected following exposure to the unvaccinated teacher. At least 18 of them contracted the delta variant, the CDC concluded.
“The outbreak’s attack rate highlights the Delta variant’s increased transmissibility and potential for rapid spread, especially in unvaccinated populations such as schoolchildren too young for vaccination,” the report reads.
Experts also concluded that the outbreak’s impact on the broader community may have been limited thanks to Marin County’s high vaccination rate, one of the best in California. At the time of the outbreak, 72 percent of eligible people had been fully vaccinated in the city where the school is located, according to the report.PauseCurrent Time 1:28/Duration 3:35Loaded: 69.79%Unmute0LOCaptionsFullscreenCDC recommends all students wear masks when they return to schoolClick to expand
However, new evidence of the delta variant’s “high transmissibility, even among fully vaccinated persons, supports recommendations for universal masking in schools. … Proper masking, routine testing, ventilation, and staying home while symptomatic are important to ensure safe school instruction,” the CDC said.
As we begin the budget debates for fiscal year 2022, the 117th Congress has just begun and new Cabinet members are confirmed and take their seats, as advocates we have an opportunity to educate those that will create and enforce law.
We INVITE you to read the following action item and, if you agree with what we are asking for, send it to your representatives. We are asking that a real hearing, not one stacked with those that participated in “Ten Years to AML,” give testimony.
Our outreach representative has been informed that there is a chance that a hearing will be scheduled on both the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program AND a separate hearing on “Extremism on public lands.” We are asking you to help us move the hearing on the wild horse and burro program along.
Committee assignments for the 117th Congress have been made. The House natural Resources Committee members can be found HERE. If one of these Congressional representatives is from your district, we urge you to write an email or call. You can use the wording below:
On the 50th Anniversary of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has implemented a program that is fiscally irresponsible to the taxpayer and morally bankrupt to the public interest they serve.
In 2020, the BLM presented Congress with a report that contains 32 pages; only 16 of which describe how BLM utilizes their authorities to implement the law. The report presents so little real information that there is not even a table of contents. Much of the information provided is assertion without proof and is easily refuted as not factual, just as the report land management agencies presented to Congress on National Monuments. In fact, the agenda to decimate our last large wild horse herds is directly tied to the same groups that met with Ryan Zinke, Brian Steed, William Perry Pendley over National Monuments (shown in various scheduling meeting notes). All of these individuals have demonstrated serious ethics violations that extend into the Wild Horse and Burro Program with no consequence or correction of the actions they have taken that will have devastating effect on our public resources.
The key flaws in this program are not population suppression tools, but actual management planning. The program still operates without actual management planning for each herd and without any accountability or true oversight. The report misleads the reader into believing that BLM has active management plans (HMAPs) when they simply have a handful out of the nearly 200 required. They have another handful that have not been amended since the 1980’s and have been replaced simply with removal plans. There is simply no planning to preserve habitat for wild horses and or the herd, as outlined by law. This key flaw is overlooked to keep the program in collapse to serve those that receive large subsidies and reap private profit off of public resources.
Prior to determining funding levels for a program for the fiscal year of 2022, that will be based on the assertions in that report, we urge you to request a full hearing in the House Natural Resources Committee on the validity of the report the agency has based their requests for funding on.
I urge you to hold the agency accountable, just as Congress held the agency accountable on National Monuments with a hearing and investigation into egregious errors in the report the agency handed to Congress. Wild horses and burros in the US, and the public interest, deserve no less from our lawmakers. The Wild Horse and Burro Program has been the most neglected and maligned, and has been easily corrupted. This injustice must be remedied if the program is going to serve the intention of law and stop being a fiscal black hole for the taxpayer.
The following article explains why we are asking you to take the action.
We presented an article that addresses a bit about how “action items” work in the 3 branches of government. Each branch has a distinct authority that can effect a distinct change you want to create. As the winter roundup season winds down the legislative “season” of advocacy kicks into gear. You can read the piece HERE.
Wild horses are a multifaceted public lands resource, creating the necessity for a multifaceted approach to advocating for them.
When dealing with legislators (when you call or write a letter) and asking for them to vote on a bill, like it or not, you have entered the ring of politics. Just like commenting on an EA for a proposed roundup, you need to know the terrain and be specific in the words you choose.
In 2018 Congress rejected what BLM had presentedand requested a new report. The 2020 report did not get as much “push back” as the 2018 report as those urging Congress to obligate the taxpayer to buy a single substance (PZP) were very effective at getting the public to push simply for that substance. In 2020 Congress gave BLM a bit over 15 million in additional funds to implement “non-lethal” population growth suppression tools in 2021.
There are many reasons we need Congress to reject the 2020 document and request an actual report on the program. The document is not a report, it is a barebones document that does not even have a table of contents, misleading photographs with no context, and was basically written simply using the public relations material presented at the “invitation only” meeting of pro-slaughter groups in Utah dubbed a “summit of the wild horse.” The document needs to be tossed and a real, data rich report crafted.
However, the 2020 report still stands as the agency baseline for the budget debate today. The debate has already begin for 2022 that will begin to fund the agency in October 2021 (please remember the federal government works on a fiscal year that begins in Oct; fiscal 2022 begins Oct 2021).
Page 1-8 is essentially a press release that repeats the copy/paste of their interpretation of their authority, a copy/paste of the beginning of almost every roundup that repeats assertions of range data and incorporates the “Ten Years to AML” backdoor dealwith large corporate interests that was run, without public input or scrutiny, since 2015.
Not until we get to page 9, does BLM begin to present any assertion of a report based on how they prioritize and fund the program:
Removals (2.5 pages)
Population Growth Suppression, including sterilization (3 pages)
Private Care Placement, the new name for adoption/sale (2 pages)
Euthanasia (1 sentence)
Sale Without Limits, slaughter (1 sentence)
Off-Range Corrals, or Long-Term Holding (4 pages)
Resource Monitoring (1/2 page)
Population Survey (1/2 page)
Herd Management Area Plan Development (1/2 page)
Research (1/2 page)
Rangeland Restoration and Rehabilitation (1/2 page)
Oversight (2 sentences)
Then, on page 24, we are presented with a couple of paragraphs in a “Conclusory” statement that continues to present photos without context. If you had the context of every single picture BLM uses in this report you would see the failures run deep in field offices that have used “blame the horse and remove” for 50 years.
When you get “push back” talking to you representatives aides? we suggest you bring up the report. 16 pages. 16 pages is what BLM presented to Congress on the entire workings program wide.
However, without even reading any of the content you can see why the program has failed. Roundups, and population growth suppression, are the last phase of on-range management, yet, BLM always prioritizes remove and stockpile. Oversight and management planning for our herds should come first and provide the most in-depth information to base every other item on this list. Management planning creates the baseline for all other actions and oversight of planning and executed actions makes sure that the agency operates with transparency and inclusivity.
Simply changing the order of current priorities, making Oversight and HMAPs the fist step, the program could begin to move out of the mistakes of the past that have led to an absurd program that is fiscally irresponsible to the taxpayer and morally bankrupt to the public interest and resource (wild horses are a public resource under law, not a permitted use for private profit).
As a result of this report, and those “in the deal,” for 2021 spending Congress simply awarded BLM an additional $15 million to utilize “non-lethal” population growth suppression.
There was no hearing on the merits of the report, nothing. We did not have a hearing because the big corporate groups had the public bombarding Congress as they simply asked for more funding for fertility control. All of he funding was based on the assertions in the 2020 report and those assertions solidified as the focus became “population suppression tools.”
The debate for spending in 2022 has already kicked off. That debate leaves off where the last one stood; all of it begins with accepting the assertions and lack of actual data in the 2020 report.
When the Department of Interior handed Congress a report on two National Monuments in New Mexico, Senator Martin Heinrich grilled BLM on that report.
John Ruhs, former NV State Director now serving as the Deputy Director of BLM, says he was not involved with crafting the report on the two monuments when pressed by Senator Heinrich.
However, Ruhs was deeply involved with the “Ten Years to AML” crowd, the off-limits to the public “Utah Summit” and both the 2018 and 2020 reports on the Wild Horse and Burro Program.
Why didn’t anyone in Congress grill BLM over their report on wild horses? The factual errors are just as egregious as those in the report on the 2 National Monuments. The public deserves more from Congress than simply bending to the will of well-funded corporate lobbyists that all benefit from the subsidized programs created by the agency.
We INVITE you to read the following action item and, if you agree with what we are asking for, send it to your representatives. We are asking that a real hearing, not one stacked with those that participated in “Ten Years to AML,” give testimony.
OR you can find your Congressional representative HERE. You can write, or call, and ask that they urge The House natural Resources Committee to schedule a hearing on the Wild Horse and Burro program prior to funding determinations being finalized.
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© Centers for Disease Control This classroom seating chart shows the proximity of a Marin County teacher, to students who later tested positive for Covid. (Centers for Disease Control)
