USFWS Proposes to Delist the Gray Wolf and Expand Recovery ...

Gray wolf (Canis lupus). (Credit: Gary Kramer/USFWS)

On June 13, 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) published two proposed rules regarding the threatened and endangered listing status of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), opening a 90-day comment period on both. The first proposal involves delisting the gray wolf by 2014 in the remaining contiguous U.S. in addition to several already delisted populations within the Northern Rocky Mountains (Mont., N.D., S.D., Neb., Kan., Colo., Utah, and Wyo.) and the Great Lakes region (Ill., Ind., Iowa, Mich., Minn., Mo., Ohio, Wis.). Those distinct population segments were delisted in 2011 and 2012, respectively, and have since been managed by the states under USFWS-approved state management plans with five-year monitoring programs by the USFWS. Washington and Oregon also have management plans for the wolves currently recolonizing their states. This proposal would maintain protections for the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), by listing it as an endangered subspecies.

The second proposal would revise the existing nonessential experimental population designation of the Mexican wolf to allow raised wolves to be released throughout the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area in the Apache and Gila National Forests of east central Arizona and west central New Mexico.

These proposals are based on the best available science and a recent comprehensive review that includes new taxonomic data from Chambers et al. (2012). The USFWS reports that the current gray wolf listing needs to be revised. Now that some populations are considered recovered and have been delisted, the entire C. lupus species can no longer be listed as endangered. Instead, any endangered populations must be listed separately as either endangered subspecies (like the Mexican wolf) or so-called ?distinct population segments.?

According to a USFWS news release, ?there are at least 6,100 gray wolves in the contiguous U.S., with a current estimate of 1,674 in the Northern Rocky Mountains and 4,432 in the Western Great Lakes.? During the 2012 annual year-end survey, the Mexican Wolf Interagency Field Team counted a minimum of 75 Mexican wolves living in the wild in Arizona and New Mexico, an increase from 58 in 2011.

The USFWS is seeking additional scientific, commercial, and technical information from the public and other interested parties during the comment period for the two proposed rules, prior to the USFWS?s final determination in 2014. Public hearing requests must be made in writing and within 45 days of the date the proposals were published in the Federal Register.

Thus far, more than 10,000 comments have already been submitted to regulations.gov.

Comments may be submitted until 11:59 p.m. on September 11, 2013, online or by mail to:

Public Comments
Processing, Attn: [*please use the appropriate docket number for each species ? see below]
Division of Policy and Directives Management
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
4401 N. Fairfax Drive
MS 2042?PDM
Arlington, VA 22203

*Please include the correct docket number for comment submissions:
Gray wolf: Docket No. [FWS?HQ?ES?2013?0073]
Mexican wolf: Docket No. [FWS-R2-ES-2013-0056]

?

Sources: Federal Register (June 13, 2013), FWS Gray Wolf Recovery (June 7, 2013), FWS Gray Wolf Recovery Press Release (June 7, 2013), FAQs for Gray Wolf and Delisting (June, 2013), FWS Bulletin (June 13, 2013).

More information: What States Are Saying; Federal Register notices on the gray wolf (or download the PDF) and the Mexican wolf (or download PDF); gray wolf profile page; Information on the Mountain Prairie Region gray wolf, the Midwest Region gray wolf, and the Southwest Region Mexican wolf; USFWS gray wolf Flickr page; USFWS Director Dan Ashe blog on wolves.

Source: http://news.wildlife.org/featured/usfws-proposes-to-delist-the-gray-wolf-and-expand-recovery-efforts-for-mexican-wolf/

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Not Even Not Even? (Unqualified Offerings)

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Wing walker, pilot die in crash at Ohio air show

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) ? A plane carrying a wing walker crashed Saturday at an air show and exploded into flames, killing the pilot and stunt walker instantly, authorities said.

Dayton International Airport spokeswoman Linda Hughes and Ohio State Highway Patrol Lt. Anne Ralston confirmed the deaths to The Associated Press.

The crash happened at around 12:45 p.m. at the Vectren Air Show at the Dayton airport. No spectators were injured.

The show has been canceled for the remainder of the day, but organizers said events would resume Sunday. The names of those killed weren't immediately released, but a video posted on WHIO-TV showing the flight and crash identified the performer as wing walker Jane Wicker. A schedule posted on the event's website also had Wicker scheduled to perform.

The video shows the plane turn upside-down as Wicker sits on top of the wing. The plane then tilts and crashes to the ground, exploding into flames as spectators scream.

"All of a sudden I heard screaming and looked up and there was a fireball," spectator Stan Thayer of Wilmington, Ohio, told WHIO.

Another spectator, Shawn Warwick of New Knoxville, told the Dayton Daily News that he was watching the flight through binoculars.

"I noticed it was upside-down really close to the ground. She was sitting on the bottom of the plane," he said. "I saw it just go right into the ground and explode."

Wicker's website says she responded to a classified ad from the Flying Circus Airshow in Bealeton, Va., in 1990, for a wing-walking position, thinking it would be fun. Her full-time job was as a budget analyst for the Federal Aviation Administration, according to her website.

She told WDTN-TV in an interview this week that her signature move was hanging underneath the plane's wing by her feet and sitting on the bottom of the airplane while it's upside-down.

"I'm never nervous or scared because I know if I do everything as I usually do, everything's going to be just fine," she told the station.

Wicker wrote on her website that she had never had any close calls.

"What you see us do out there is after an enormous amount of practice and fine tuning, not to mention the airplane goes through microscopic care. It is a managed risk and that is what keeps us alive," she wrote.

In 2007, veteran stunt pilot Jim LeRoy was killed at the Dayton show when his biplane slammed into the runway while performing loop-to-loops and caught fire.

Organizers were presenting a trimmed-down show and expected smaller crowds at Dayton after the Air Force Thunderbirds and other military participants pulled out this year because of federal budget cuts.

The air show, one of the country's oldest, usually draws around 70,000 people and has a $3.2 million impact on the local economy. Without military aircraft and support, the show expected attendance to be off 30 percent or more.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wing-walker-pilot-die-crash-ohio-air-show-191655523.html

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Dear Lillie: Final Tour of our Townhome

Well, seeing how we spent the weekend moving out of our townhouse and tomorrow morning (Monday) will be moving into our new home I thought it would be a fitting time to give a final tour of our old home. When you first walked through our front door we had this tiny little space that kind of functioned as our entry area.

Directly next to the bench was our staicase. You can see the before here and how we very inexpensively made the frames here.


I am going to share a lot more living room photos this week as part of the One Room, Three Ways Series so for today will just share one and will come back and update it and add more once I post them. But this is how it last looked:

And here were the last photos I took of the dining room (although I ended up putting the chairs back in the family room):

And the ever-changing dining room chalkboard:

The dining room lead into the kitchen:

And the kitchen opens up to the family room:

And off the kitchen/family room is the back porch:

?When you head upstairs the first bedroom was Lillie's (and recently it became Lola's too once she moved into a "big girl bed").

And then there's Lola's room:

And lastly our room:

Well, that's it! We have made so many memories in this home and it is the only place Lillie and Lola have ever lived so it was sad to say good-bye to it but we are so excited about this next chapter in our lives!

***If you have any questions about where an item is from, paint colors or how something was made be sure to click here for our "Our Home" page that has all sorts of details,? here for our "Tutorials" page, or here for our "FAQ's" page. We don't have our internet hooked up yet at our new house so I will probably get pretty behind on responding to comments.

I'll be back Tuesday Morning with Day 1 of the my One Room, Three Ways!

Source: http://dearlillieblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/final-tour-of-our-townhome.html

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Mandela remains in 'serious but stable' condition: government

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Former South African president Nelson Mandela remains in a "serious but stable" condition in hospital, the government said on Saturday.

Consistent with previous updates from the presidency, the statement shows that the 94-year-old anti-apartheid hero's health is little changed since his admission to a Pretoria hospital two weeks ago.

Mandela, who became South Africa's first black president in 1994, was rushed to a Pretoria hospital early on June 8 with a recurring respiratory infection.

The presidency also confirmed that the intensive care ambulance carrying former South African president Nelson Mandela to hospital two weeks ago broke down. Media reports said he was stranded for 40 minutes.

Presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj said the former president was transferred to another military ambulance for the remainder of the almost 50 minute journey between Johannesburg and the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria.

"All care was taken to ensure that former president Mandela's medical condition was not compromised by the unforeseen incident," Maharaj said. He would not say how long Mandela's journey to hospital had been delayed by the breakdown.

Doctors attending to Madiba, the clan name by which Mandela is popularly known, were satisfied that he suffered no harm during this period, he said.

Failure to deliver basic services under the African National Congress-led government has sparked violent protests across the country this year and are campaign points for political parties jostling for position ahead of next year's election.

Mandela's history of lung problems dates back to his time at Robben Island prison near Cape Town. He was released in 1990 after 27 years and went on to serve as president from 1994 to 1999.

His hospitalization is the fourth since December.

(Reporting by Sherilee Lakmidas; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nelson-mandela-remains-serious-stable-condition-government-092747495.html

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Court documents reveal secret rules allowing NSA to use US data without a warrant

NSA's information gathering practices have been further detailed in court papers revealed by The Guardian. While the agency has continued to reiterate that it doesn't collect its data indiscriminately, the leaked papers detail several loopholes that allow it to gather data from both American and foreign origins without the need for a warrant. If you use data encryption or other privacy tools, your communications are likely to receive extra attention, and the agency can indefinitely keep any information assembled for "crypto-analytic, traffic analysis or signal exploitation purposes" -- in short, if the NSA believes may be relevant in the future.

One reason to hold onto said files could simply be the fact that the data is encrypted and NSA wants to be able to analyze its protection. The security agency can also give the FBI and other government organizations any data if it contains a significant amount of foreign intelligence, or information about a crime that has (or will be) committed. Any data that's "inadvertently acquired" through the NSA's methods -- and could potentially contain details of US citizens -- can be held for up to five years before it has to be deleted. The Guardian's uploaded the leaked papers in full -- hit the source links for more.

Filed under: Internet

Comments

Via: The Guardian, Forbes

Source: The Guardian (1), (2)

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Weinstein Co. Shifts Meryl Streep-Julia Roberts 'August: Osage County' to Christmas

By Todd Cunningham

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The Weinstein Company on Thursday shifted the release date of one of its main awards hopefuls, "August: Osage County," to Christmas Day. It had been scheduled to debut on November 8.

Christmas is getting crowded. Also set to debut on that day are Universal's Keanu Reeves action drama "47 Ronin," Paramount's Chris Pine-Keira Knightley action thriller "Jack Ryan" and the Fox comedy "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

The studio also shifted "Grace of Monaco," a biopic starring Nicole Kidman as Hollywood star-turned-princess Grace Kelly, from December 27 to November 27, the day before Thanksgiving.

"August: Osage County" is directed by John Wells and produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov. The cast includes Meryl Streep playing a pill-popping mother and Julia Roberts as her bitter daughter. Also featured are Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ewan McGregor, Sam Shepard, Abigail Breslin and Juliette Lewis.

The Tracy Letts play that inspired the film snagged just about every major theatrical prize including the Pulitzer when it debuted on Broadway in 2007.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/weinstein-co-shifts-meryl-streep-julia-roberts-august-211620704.html

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3D map of human brain is the most detailed ever

The folds, creases and intricate internal structures that make up the human brain are being revealed in unprecedented detail. A new three-dimensional map called BigBrain is the most detailed ever constructed, and should lead to a more accurate picture of how the brain's different regions function and interact.

Until now, the precise placement of the neurons that make up our brain circuitry has been difficult to map, largely because the human brain's surface is covered with folds and creases. Slicing a brain exposes only two dimensions, so it is often unclear where and how the cells within these folds are organised in three-dimensional space.

To make the new map, Katrin Amunts of the J?lich Research Centre in Germany and her colleagues embedded a 65-year old woman's brain in wax, sliced it into more than 7400 sections each 20 micrometres thick ? one-fifth of the width of a human hair ? and made digital images of the slices, also at a resolution of 20 micrometres.

Reassembling these images into a full 3D model of the brain was no easy task. It required 1000 hours on a supercomputer. But because the images' resolution was so high, the computer was able to determine the 3D shape of each fold correctly, even if the slice had been cut at an angle.

Tour de force

"It's a tour de force that has never been achieved before," says Arthur Toga of the University of California, Los Angeles. The model's resolution is 50 times higher than that of previous maps, allowing it to make out individual cell bodies ? although not all of the projections that connect one cell to another. It bridges a gap, Toga says, between low-resolution images from brain scans of living people and microscopic images of the connections between individual nerve cells.

Amunts's group plans to post BigBrain online as a template for other researchers to use and integrate with other findings. For instance, by superimposing maps of gene activity, it may be possible to work out which cells are performing particular functions.

It may also serve as a useful reference for the BRAIN initiative championed by US president Barack Obama, which aims to map all of the brain's activity. "You can't map function unless you can relate it to structure," says Toga.

Van Wedeen of Harvard University, who has argued that the brain is based on an underlying 3D grid, hopes the map will reveal similarly unexpected patterns and structure. "There's a tremendous amount we still don't know," he says.

Brain training

By making similar maps of further brains, it should also be possible to study natural variability in brain structure, and look for abnormalities linked to specific neurological diseases. Amunts is already well on the way to reconstructing a second brain ? which should go faster now that her group has trail-blazed its method.

Meanwhile, Jacopo Annese of the University of California, San Diego, is in the midst of constructing maps based on fewer, thicker slices, but imaging each with a resolution of just 0.5 micrometres. This should reveal the connections between individual cells.

Annese's group, called The Brain Observatory, recently sliced the brain of a person who had suffered from epilepsy and who had lost his long-term memory after surgery. The team is now constructing digital models of sections from this brain and those from 60 other people, including some who had been living with various psychiatric disorders.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.123538

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Four Senators seek to bar military aid to Syrian rebels

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four senators introduced legislation on Thursday that would bar President Barack Obama from providing military aid to Syria's rebels, saying the administration has provided too little information about what they see as a risky intervention.

The bill would prevent the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies from using any funds to support military, paramilitary or covert operations in Syria, directly or indirectly.

The bill's sponsors - Democrats Tom Udall of New Mexico and Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Republicans Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky - expressed doubts about Washington's ability to ensure weapons will not fall into the wrong hands, and called for debate in Congress before the United States becomes more involved in Syria's civil war.

"The president's unilateral decision to arm Syrian rebels is incredibly disturbing, considering what little we know about whom we are arming," Paul said in a statement.

Other lawmakers argued it was in the U.S. national security interest to get more involved in Syria.

"This is about looking at the possibility of a failed state in which terrorist actors already present within Syria in this fight can launch attacks against our allies, and potentially against the United States," Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters.

After months of equivocating, Obama decided a week ago to provide military aid to rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, citing Assad's government's use chemical weapons in the two-year-long conflict.

The administration has since been working to win more support in Congress for the plan. Secretary of State John Kerry, a former senator, has been on Capitol Hill at least twice this week to make the administration's case to lawmakers.

On Tuesday he had a classified briefing for House of Representatives leaders from both parties and committee chairmen.

On Thursday Kerry conducted at least three briefings: one for the House Intelligence Committee, a second for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a third for other senators.

Many members of Congress, particularly in the Republican-controlled House, remain deeply skeptical about plans to arm the rebels, questioning the cost when other programs are being cut and worrying that U.S. weapons could fall into the wrong hands.

Others have been pushing for military aid for months, with some senators in particular denouncing Obama for his failure to intervene in a conflict in which more than 90,000 people have been killed.

Last month the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 15-3 in favor of a bill to provide lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. That measure has not yet gone to the full Senate for a vote.

Paul, Murphy and Udall were the three members of the foreign relations panel who voted against that bill.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Stacey Joyce and Xavier Briand)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/four-u-senators-seek-bar-military-aid-syrian-195405238.html

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Snail trail reveals ancient human migration

June 20, 2013 ? Geneticists from The University of Nottingham have used snails to uncover evidence of an ancient human migration from the Pyrenean region of France to Ireland.

Dr Angus Davison, Reader in Evolutionary Genetics at the University, and PhD student Adele Grindon, found that snails in Ireland and the Pyrenees are genetically almost identical, despite being thousands of miles apart. And -- as snails aren't renowned for their speed -- the simplest explanation is that snails hitched a ride with human migrants approximately 8,000 years ago.

The research is published in journal PLOS ONE on 19 June.

From France to Ireland

Dr Davison said: "There is a very clear pattern, which is difficult to explain except by involving humans. If the snails naturally colonised Ireland, you would expect to find some of the same genetic type in other areas of Europe, especially Britain. We just don't find them.

"There are records of Mesolithic or Stone Age humans eating snails in the Pyrenees, and perhaps even farming them. The highways of the past were rivers and the ocean -- as the river that flanks the Pyrenees was an ancient trade route to the Atlantic, what we're actually seeing might be the long lasting legacy of snails that hitched a ride, accidentally or perhaps as food, as humans travelled from the South of France to Ireland 8,000 years ago.

"The results tie in with what we know from human genetics about the human colonisation of Ireland -- the people may have come from somewhere in southern Europe."

The flora and fauna of Ireland

Despite being close geographically, Ireland is home to many plants and animals which aren't found in Britain.

Dr Davison said: "You would think that anything that gets to Ireland would go through Britain, but it has been a longstanding mystery as to why Ireland is so different from Britain. For these snails, at least, the difference may be that they hitched a ride on a passing boat."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/LufOxMAJE5I/130620084633.htm

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