A late evening varmint hunt on land south of Christoval turned into a search for a missing person late Friday night and stretched into Saturday afternoon.
On Friday, June 18, at 11:14 p.m., the Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office responded to a distress call from an individual who advised he was in a dangerous situation. He made the call on his cell phone. The nature of the problem was not immediately clear due to the caller being in an area with very poor cell service, the Sheriff’s Office stated.
After further investigation by the Sheriff’s Office, they determined the caller had been hunting with friends and became separated from his group. The hunter subsequently was lost on unfamiliar terrain at night and remained missing from the time the Sheriff was called until daytime hours Saturday afternoon.
A ground and air search was initiated for the lost hunter. The lost…
In Arizona, sportsmen and women are witnessing changes to our landscape brought on by our warming climate. What little snowpack we have isn’t lasting through February and longer, and dryer summers are leading to more catastrophic wildfires, which we’re already seeing. Fire season started at the beginning of March, with multiple fires currently burning across Arizona. Our flora and fauna are suffering, and all of this is having a direct effect on the ecosystems and wildlife we strive to protect.
Let’s bury the hatchet on how we arrived at this destination and work together to solve this pressing issue that will affect our hunting and fishing heritage for future generations.
Arizona’s sportsmen and women’s conservation groups work hard to complete on-the-ground restoration projects, but we can’t do it alone. There needs to be leadership at the federal level to pass common sense climate change legislation, which will help conserve…
A puzzling epidemic ofblack fungusinIndiais spiraling out of control, with tens of thousands of COVID-19 survivors now battling the infection which can lead to blindness and death.
On June 11,NDTVreported that there were 31,216 cases ofmucormycosisin the country and 2,109 deaths due to the infection — a 150% increase over the previous three weeks.
The government in India has not released official numbers, according toThe New York Times. But last…
image captionEbrahim Raisi Iran’s ballistic missile programme and regional issues were not up for discussion
Iran’s president-elect has welcomed the negotiations with world powers aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear deal but said they must guarantee national interests.
At his first news conference since his victory in Friday’s election, Ebrahim Raisi promised he would not allow the talks in Vienna to be dragged out.
He also insisted that Iran’s ballistic missile programme was “not negotiable”.
The nuclear deal has been close to collapse since the US abandoned it and reinstated sanctions three years ago.
Iran nuclear crisis: The basics
World powers don’t trust Iran:Some countries believe Iran wants nuclear power because it wants to build a nuclear bomb – it denies this.
So a deal was struck:In 2015, Iran and six other countries reached a major agreement. Iran would stop…
New rules, legislation would revamp markets for livestock, poultry
Farmer and rancher groups have complained that meat companies have recorded big profits while farmers’ incomes have taken hits.PHOTO: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
By Jacob BungeJune 21, 2021 12:58 pm ET
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The American meatpacking industry faces stricter oversight in Washington, as lawmakers and regulators push an overhaul of the $213 billion sector following complaints about meat companies’ alleged influence over markets and farmers.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is crafting new rules that would change how companies such as Tyson Foods Inc. and Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. pay chicken farmers, while making it easier for farmers to pursue disputes against meatpackers, the agency said this month. On Capitol Hill, Republican and Democratic lawmakers have proposed legislation that would require beef processors like Cargill Inc. and JBS USA Holdings Inc. to buy more cattle on open markets, and set minimum regional prices.
Senators this month rolled out a separate bill that would appoint a special investigator to enforce meatpacking regulations and probe potential anticompetitive conduct. The Senate Agriculture Committee is set to hold a hearing Wednesday to examine meatpackers’ cattle purchasing—and how that affects livestock markets and burger prices for consumers.
Driving the efforts is some farmers’ growing frustration over the scale of the country’s biggest meatpackers. Farmer and rancher groups have complained that meat companies have recorded big profits while farmers’ incomes have suffered, including through disruptions like 2020’s pandemic-driven plant shutdowns and the May cyberattack on JBS. Those challenges followed years of low agricultural commodity prices, which helped push more producers into bankruptcy.
Andy Green, the USDA’s senior adviser for fair and competitive markets, said some of farmers’ troubles stem from a handful of companies controlling the bulk of U.S. meat processing.
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the most prominent faces of Republican resistance to former President Donald Trump, has spent tens of thousands of dollars on security this year, The New York Times reported over the weekend.
Death threats following Cheney’s impeachment vote led her campaign to spend $58,000 on security, including three former Secret Service officers, from January to March, according to The Times.
She was also assigned protection by the Capitol Police while in Washington, DC, which The Times described as “an unusual measure for a House member not in a leadership position.”
Cheney’s events in Wyoming have not been widely publicized in advance for security reasons, The Times reported.
Despite the threats, Cheney, who was first elected to the House in 2016, has not backed down from her criticism of Trump.
Cheney has said she saw the Capitol insurrection as an affront to the rule of law — it disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory and sent lawmakers into secure spaces away from the mayhem unfolding at the building.
To her, Trump abdicated a commitment to a secure and peaceful transfer of power, threatening democracy with debunked theories he used to whip up supporters who felt that he had been wronged.
“None of this would have happened without the President,” she said in January. “The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
The Times reported that Cheney’s father, Dick, the former vice president, called her on January 6 to warn her of the dangers she might face after Trump had called her out earlier that day.
The congresswoman’s father asked her if she wanted to go ahead with her plan to give a floor speech in support of the certification of Biden’s victory, according to The Times.
Cheney was undeterred. “Absolutely,” she told her father, according to The Times. “Nothing could be more important.”
Minutes later, rioters breached the Capitol; Cheney never gave that floor speech. However, she has pledged to “do everything” she can to keep Trump from reentering the Oval Office.
(CNN)Some states are making great strides in vaccinating their residentsagainst Covid-19, but the ones that are not may soon be contending with a more transmissible variant, experts say.About 45.1% of the US population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19,CDC data showed, and in 16 states and Washington, DC, that proportion is up to half. Butsome states– such as Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wyoming — have fully vaccinated less than 35% of residents.More than 500 days and 600,000 deathssince the first person in the United States was reported to have died from Covid-19, experts have upheld vaccines as the key to reopening the country safely and containing the variants, many of which are more transmissible.
The Delta variant, which is believed to be more transmissible and cause more severe disease, could cause an upsurge in infections, but the levels will vary…
Plinian column of the eruption of Sarychev (Russia) on 12 June 2009. Credit: NASA
The most severe mass extinction event in the past 540 million years eliminated more than 90 percent of Earth’s marine species and 75 percent of terrestrial species. Although scientists had previously hypothesized that the end-Permian mass extinction, which took place 251 million years ago, was triggered by voluminous volcanic eruptions in a region of what is now Siberia, they were not able to explain the mechanism by which the eruptions resulted in the extinction of so many different species, both in the oceans and on land.
Associate professor Laura Wasylenki of Northern Arizona University’s School of Earth and Sustainability and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is co-author on a new paper inNature Communicationsentitled, “Nickelisotopeslink Siberian Traps aerosol particles to the end-Permian mass…
A diagram of the orbit path of 2014 UN271, which will make its closest pass in 2031JPL Solar System DynamicsVIEW 1 IMAGES
The outskirts of our solar system is teeming with mysterious objects – and now one of them is heading our way. Astronomers have discovered a minor planet that’s about to make its closest pass to the Sun on its 600,000-year orbit.
The object in question is designated 2014 UN271, and it was only recently identified in data from the Dark Energy Survey captured between 2014 and 2018. Size estimates place it anywhere between 100 and 370 km (62 and 230 miles) wide. If it’s a comet, it’s quite a big one, especially for one coming from the outer solar system.
“[That] puts it on a similar scale, if not larger than, Sarabat’s huge comet C/1729 P1, and almost undoubtedly the largest Oort Cloud object ever discovered – almost in dwarf planet territory!” says Sam Deen, a citizen astronomer, in a post on the Minor Planet Mailing List (MPML) forum.
But by far the most intriguing thing about 2014 UN271 is its orbit around the Sun. This thing is extremely eccentric, journeying between the inner solar system and the Oort cloud that marks the boundary of interstellar space over a period of 612,190 years.
And it turns out, astronomers are about to witness the closest pass of this incredible round trip. Currently, 2014 UN271 is about 22 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun (for reference, Earth is 1 AU from the Sun). That means it’s already closer than Neptune, at 29.7 AU. And it’s not stopping there – it’s already traveled 7 AU in the last seven years, and at its closest in 2031, it’s expected to pass within 10.9 AU of the Sun, almost reaching the orbit of Saturn.
Before then, it’s expected to develop the characteristic coma and tail of a comet, as icy material on its surface vaporizes from the heat of the Sun. This close pass would give astronomers an unprecedented close look at Oort cloud objects.
Unfortunately for us amateurs on the ground, don’t expect to see a show on the scale of Halley’s comet. While it’s too early to tell for sure, Deen calculates that 2014 UN271 would, at best, become about as bright as Pluto in the night sky, but more likely it’ll reach the brightness of Pluto’s moon Charon. Still, we’ll probably get some amazing shots from telescopes and observatories of the time.https://e012bf0bfa4469e1ffb3df15c1c26204.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
After its close pass, 2014 UN271 will then hurtle back out into the inky blackness, on a several-hundred millennia return trip to the Oort cloud, and an incredible peak distance of almost 60,000 AU.
BY JOEL CLEMENT, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR —06/20/21 05:00 PM EDT535THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILLShare to FacebookShare to Twitter
As society struggles to step up to the challenges posed by the climate change freight train and its impacts on health, safety, the economy and the environment, every possible solution is on the table. While we already have the technology to transition away from burning fossil fuels, the cause of rapid climate change, some scientists and wealthy donors doubt that we will do so. For that reason, we are seeing more frequentinvestmentsin efforts to mask the effects of global warming until the problem can be solved. First among these is what is known as solar geoengineering.
Solar geoengineering is a misnomer used to describe efforts to reduce the amount of solar…
