Dinosaur fossil from a supposed huge carnivore belongs to something else

By Megan Marples, CNN 

A dinosaur fossil footprint found about 50 years ago is from a plant-eating dinosaur -- not a huge meat-eating dinosaur as previously thought, according to a new study.

© Kamil Porembinski/Creative Commons/Courtesy Dr. Anthony Romilio 

The Prosauropod is an herbivorous dinosaur who lived during the Triassic age.

The footprint, which dates back to the Triassic Period about 220 million years ago, was initially thought to have come from a large dinosaur from the Eubrontes family, said lead study author Anthony Romilio, a technical assistant in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences at the University of Queensland in Australia, in a statement.

He worked with a team of international researchers to reanalyze the fossil and found the footprint belonged to the Prosauropod, an herbivorous dinosaur. This would make the footprint the only physical evidence of any Triassic-age Prosauropod in Australia, Romilio said.

The fossil was discovered in a coal mine in Ipswich, a city west of Brisbane, nearly 656 feet (200 meters) underground. Scientists at the time estimated the creature that made the footprint to have legs over 6 feet (2 meters) tall, which would have made it the largest carnivorous dinosaur of the Triassic period, he said.

Romilio wasn't buying it -- in part because of a lack of consistent data regarding the fossil.

"I knew about this fossil many years ago and was surprised there was no consensus on basic details such as the footprint length or even its shape," he said.

One indication the footprint came from an herbivore like Prosauropod was the shape of the feet, Romilio said. Predatory dinosaurs had toes that were bunched together, but the fossil's toes were spread apart.

This long-necked animal had legs around 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) tall and was nearly 20 feet (6 meters) in length. The dinosaur likely had a small head and walked on two feet, Romilio added.

Earlier scientists were not able to examine the fossil when conducting their research, which forced them to make their conclusions based on photographs and drawings, Romilio said in the statement.

Geologists made plaster casts of the footprint in 1964, which were later turned into 3D models that the research team studied, said coauthor Hendrik Klein, in a statement. He is a fossil expert at Saurierwelt Paläontologisches Museum in Germany.

"The more we looked at the footprint and toe impression shapes and proportions, the less they resembled tracks made by predatory dinosaurs -- this monster dinosaur was definitely a much friendlier plant-eater," Klein said.

Dinosaur enthusiasts can catch a glimpse of the dinosaur fossil at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane or take a look at the 3D model online.

Romilio is investigating other dinosaur fossil footprints in China, South Korea and the United States to learn more about the creatures that made them.

Each dinosaur created millions of tracks across its lifetime, so collectively they left significantly more fossil footprints than bones to research, he said.

The study published Thursday in Historical Biology.

© Courtesy Dr. Anthony Romilio Researchers looked at 3D images of the fossil footprint to determine what type of dinosaur made those tracks.

Los Angeles observes 150 years since one of the largest lynchings in American history

Kimmy Yam 

A century and a half after a violent race riot in Los Angeles’ Chinatown terrorized the city’s Chinese American community, area schools and organizations are calling attention to the 1871 massacre, which they consider a “forgotten history.”

 

© Provided by NBC News

In observance of the 150th anniversary Sunday, local groups have been commemorating the race riot, which resulted in the murder of roughly 20 Chinese Americans — among the largest mass lynchings in American history. The organizations hosted a livestream performance and a K-12 teacher training workshop on the riot last week.

An estimated 500 white and Latino men and boys participated, after white police officers got involved in a dispute in Chinatown. About 10 percent of the area’s Chinese population were killed that day.

“Remembering both the accomplishments and achievements of different groups in society is as important as remembering the tragedies,” Karen Umemoto, director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, one of the universities involved, told NBC Asian America. “That can help us figure out what it is we need to put in place as a society so that we can all thrive equally.”

Hao Huang, a music professor at Scripps College (which is also participating), who produced a podcast on the topic, “Blood on Gold Mountain,” said that the tragedy began with an argument between Chinese crime organizations.

One reason these associations emerged was "because there was regular violence by non-Chinese toward Chinese,” Huang said. “There was sort of a demand for protection rackets, who kind of started to victimize the people who they were supposed to protect.”

The dispute began when a Chinese woman who had been arranged to be married to an older merchant ran off with a younger man, Huang said. Both men belonged to the associations. When a shootout ensued, white police officers responded to the scene. In the chaos, a civilian, saloon owner Robert Thompson, was killed. A police officer, Jesus Bilderrain, was also injured.

“Both of them shot first … but once Robert Thompson was killed, then all hell broke loose because people were running around saying ‘the Chinamen are killing white people by wholesale,’” Huang said. “It was very opportunistic violence.”

In addition to lynchings, many white residents looted Chinatown, stealing roughly $1.5 million of property in current dollars, money the immigrants could not afford to lose, Huang said.

"The Chinese arrived here because ironically they called California 'Gold Mountain,'” Huang said. “They did not find gold. They found death. And it really took only two hours to kill at least 20 of them.”

Huang emphasized that though about 20 bodies were found, there could have been more deaths that went undiscovered. But of the hundreds who were involved in the killings and destruction, not a single person was held accountable. The few who were arrested were released on a technicality, and ultimately no one would serve a prison sentence. Chinatown had been burned down and was never rebuilt, and the newspapers that documented the day claimed that it was “what the Chinese deserved” because it began as a dispute within the community.

Huang explained that in the late 1800s, Los Angeles had not yet developed into the metropolitan center it is today. The town was small and its Chinese American community, largely made up of immigrants who were brought over to work on the transcontinental railroad, amounted to about 200 in the entire L.A. region. About half lived in the city’s segregated area along what was known as the Calle de los Negros, where Chinatown sat.

“It was basically a very rough neighborhood. Many, many dozens of people were killed every year there,” Huang said. “It was definitely a place where no one wanted to live, and that’s where they put the Chinese.”

The environment was difficult for Chinese immigrants, who often worked for sub-standard wages in industries like food service, laundry and other forms of hard labor, Huang said.

Ellen Wu, an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington, explained that at the time, the West was a hotbed of anti-Chinese sentiment. Many white Americans ascribed to the idea of “manifest destiny,” the belief that expansion across the continent was justified and that they were the ones entitled to the bounty of the American West, she said. It was also a period when slavery had been abolished and American industrialism was on the rise, while opportunities for white people to own their own farms and work for themselves were simultaneously on the decline. White people increasingly found themselves having to earn wages by working for others, she said.

“Very quickly white workers start to basically come to a consensus that Chinese workers are different in a threatening way,” Wu said. “And a big part of that assumption, that they’re threatening, is that they are our new embodiment of unfree labor.”

Against such a backdrop, racial tensions in California were palpable, experts said, and the state would become notorious for the burnings of Chinatowns and other enclaves up and down its coast. The massacre in Los Angeles, however, was one of the first acts of mass violence and terrorism toward the Chinese American community of that era.

About a decade later, the country would implement the Chinese Exclusion Act, which put a 10-year moratorium on any Chinese labor immigration, the first legislation in the U.S. that discriminated by ethnicity.

Huang said the effects of such events were felt for years afterward, likely contributing to generational trauma and shaping the way in which many Asian Americans chose to deal with racism.

“I was told by my parents, don’t stick out, don’t make trouble. Because there is a terror that we’re different enough. You don’t need to make things worse by drawing attention to yourself,” he said. “We have a history to show that we have been targeted time and time again.”

Through events held in conjunction with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, the Chinese American Museum and Scripps College, the groups hope to keep the discussion over such racial tensions alive. And while some opponents of ethnic studies claim that discussions over these topics will only aggravate divisions in the country, Umemoto argued that such work is particularly inclusive, incorporating the histories of communities that have long been made invisible.

“We can be critical of the things that have taken place in history without necessarily blaming the ancestors of those who may have perpetrated certain justices,” Umemoto said. “There’s an ethos that those of us in ethnic studies have followed, which is that we’re teaching about the full lives of people of color in this country and Indigenous peoples in this country so that we could develop that historical empathy for one another.”

The LA Chinatown massacre podcast series – “Blood On Gold Mountain”

This multi-episode podcast series about the 1871 LA Chinatown massacre commemorates the worst mass race lynching on the West Coast, when at least 20 Chinese immigrants were killed in one night by a crowd of about 500 Angelenos, which accounted for nearly one fifth the male population of the city. This podcast series tells the story through the eyes of Yut-Ho, a young woman who arrives in LA as a refugee, only to become embroiled in a love intrigue, a gang war, and ultimately, the LA Chinatown Massacre. This little-known chapter of history finds eerie parallels to the vicious anti-Asian American attacks that are taking place today in the USA, spurred by racism and COVID-19 fears. Join us in the telling and the listening on the initial podcast release on Wednesday, March 24th, 2021, with following episodes in the series released every other Wednesday.

Trailer: https://blood-on-gold-mountain.captivate.fm/

UPDATE

In addition to a recent interview article in the Washington Post, yesterday we were interviewed for NowThis, the #1 mobile news brand in the U.S. [Nielsen DCR, June 2020]. By providing insightful context from a youth perspective, NowThis’ entertaining and informative videos are created for a mobile generation and receive over 2.6 billion monthly views [platform analytics, June 2020]. In December 2016, NowThis joined forces with Thrillist, The Dodo and Seeker to form Group Nine Media — the #1 video publisher on mobile in the U.S. [Nielsen DCR, June 2020].  

In the most recent news, our team was also awarded the UCLA Chancellor’s Arts Initiative Award to present “The Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre: 150-year Commemorative Performance and Dialogue”, a live performance in LA on October 24, 2021.

  Coverage of LA Chinatown massacre podcast to date:

Coverage:

• Press Play with Madeleine Brand on KCRW National Public Radio broadcast an interview about  the “Blood on Gold Mountain” podcast. 

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/immigration-aapi-hate-chinese-massacre-1871-film/blood-on-gold-mountain-podcast-la-chinatown

• Cinema Junkie with Beth Accomando on KPBS NPR broadcast an interview about  the “Blood on Gold Mountain” podcast. 

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/mar/24/podcast-1871-LA-chinatown-massacre/

• Interview in the Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, Pasadena Star News, Press-Enterprise and @12 other papers that are part of the Southern California News Group that number @5 million+ readers per week (more than the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle together)
• Featured on EASTWIND: Politics and Culture in Asian America

https://eastwindezine.com/blood-on-gold-mountain-two-remaining-podcasts-june-30-and-july-14/ – East Wind ezine

• Center of Asian American Media feature story:

https://caamedia.org/blog/2021/06/07/blood-on-gold-mountain-podcast-dramatizes-the-early-roots-of-anti-asian-violence/

• Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) recommends Blood on Gold Mountain

https://www.facebook.com/CAAMedia/photos/a.269767429812182/3601753569946868/?type=3

• Featured interview, KPBS-TV, Public Broadcasting Service member television station, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GChute1kVI&t=3s
• Washington Post interview with Marian Liu, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/12/la-chinatown-asian-massacre-podcast/
• Feature on digital media outlet NowThis news, a progressive social media-focused news organization and the largest distributor of news on social media

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1394513828658827265?s=20

• Interview with Inside the Issues with Alex Cohen, on Spectrum News 1, American cable news television channel founded by Time Warner Cable

https://vimeo.com/564850072

• Broadcast of entire podcast series on KSPC-FM in May, Asia-American/PI Heritage Month.  
• Claremont Courier feature article 

https://www.claremont-courier.com/articles/news/t41112gold

• The Student Life feature article

https://tsl.news/tag/blood-on-gold-mountain/

• The Scripps Voice feature article

https://tsl.news/tag/blood-on-gold-mountain/

• Guest presentation for the Harvard Club of Chicago in May and
• Guest presentation for the Harvard Club of Seattle in June

The Trump SPAC is doing stonk things, which is hilarious

Alex Wilhelm
Fri, October 22, 2021

When news broke that former U.S. President Donald Trump had conceived of a media and technology company and intended to take it public via a blank-check company, you would have been forgiven if you immediately began to wonder how quickly you could short the stock.

Pick a reason: Right-leaning social networks have largely flopped; the company appeared to be severely underfunded given the scope of its goals and the wealth of its rivals; the fact that there was no product available to use, let alone historical revenue to model forward. There are other reasons for skepticism, but those are my favorite.

And yet! Shares of the SPAC in question, Digital World Acquisition Corp, shot higher on the news. And it is repeating the feat this morning:

Recall that DWAC is the Class A share ticker symbol of Digital World Acquisition Corp, while DWACU is the same equity, but with half a warrant attached. The latter shares are up less, which is a bit odd.

Regardless, DWAC now sports a market cap of around $4.7 billion, per Yahoo Finance. That means that Digital World -- aka Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) -- is something akin to the newest unicorn to come out of the land of media and tech. Sure, it's a public price, but because the company that will merge with Digital World is so nascent as to be risible: Fuck it, let's call it a startup.

None of this makes sense. Even by the standards of 2021 and the SPAC era, this is all very stupid.

The only thing that TMTG has that makes it anything other than hot air attached to tissue-thin market statistics -- we'd like to thank the company's presentation for reminding us that podcasts are rising in popularity, a truly mind-bending insight -- is Trump's name. Recall that TMTG intends on using SPAC money to fund its operations, not Trump cash; it doesn't even really have the financial backing of the man whose name is atop its business. You know, the supposed billionaire.

Perhaps the fact that the company is so silly should have tipped us off to it becoming a memestock, or stonk. Why? Because only the wackiest companies seem to make the cut. Physical retail is falling amid rising digital delivery of gaming goods? Let's send GameStop to the moon. No one is renting cars? Let's pile into Hertz stock. That sort of thing.

So, almost, of course DWAC is going vertical. Why not?! This stock shooting higher is at once utterly hilarious and a grim indictment of efficient market theory. Nothing makes a stonk better as a meme than it making little to no sense as a business. Thus, TMTG is up a kajillion percent, which makes sense precisely in how little sense it makes.

Normally I'd just go to bed at this point, but it turns out I have a lot of work to do so, we'll leave this here for now. Good luck to everyone trading today.

stonk

[stäNGk]

NOUN

1. a concentrated artillery bombardment.

   "a mortar stonk"

VERB

1. bombard with concentrated artillery fire.

Stonks

A term to express a financial decision that resulted in financial gain. Mostly used ironically.

*1998 Yahoo refuses to buy Google for $1 million
*2002 Yahoo realizes it’s mistake, tried to buy Google for $3 billion, Google wants $5 billion, Yahoo says no
*2008 Yahoo refuses to be sold to Microsoft for $40 billion
*2016 Yahoo sold to Verizon for $4.6 billion
CEO of Yahoo: “Stonks”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Stonks

BY JORDAN WEISSMANN

JAN 28, 2021

A cry for our age. Special Meme Fresh

Americans don’t own stocks these days. They own stonks.

The purposeful misspelling, long a throwaway joke among market obsessives and memelords, has suddenly become ubiquitous as the entire worlds of media, finance, politics, and internet shitposters have intersected over the gyrations of GameStop, all thanks to a plucky, hilariously reckless band of Redditors who’ve pumped the stock’s price skyward to make bank while blowing up some hedge funds that had bet against the ailing retailer, and that are now crying betrayal at the day trading app Robinhood after it cut the action off. #Stonks are all anybody can talk about on Twitter, where it’s become the hashtag of choice for everyone following the escapades, a six-letter shorthand for the absurdity and excitement of the moment. Searches for the phrase have shot up. The original meme (see above!) is everywhere. The stonks man cometh.

This is not the first time stonks, the word, has had a moment. According to the sleuths of Know Your Meme, it first emerged on Facebook in 2017. The image of a generic business dude with a 3D-rendered head standing in front of a ticker with a giant arrow pointing up, with its suggestion of empty-headed overconfidence, became a popular template for jokes about dumb life and money decisions. (Buy a $10 scratch card and win $5? Stonks! Lose your shirt on Bitcoin? Stonks! Some guy actually tried to trade a kidnapped baby for Big Macs? Stonks!). But mostly, it was just a funnier way to say the word stocks that caught on with people who spend too much of their time on the internet, like Redditors or Elon Musk, who gave the term a big boost with a tweet in 2019.

Interest in stonks also surged in March of last year when the coronavirus was kicking into high gear and the market dropped like a rock. Speaking completely from personal observation, it’s been seeping further into common parlance ever since. I’m an economics writer, and sometimes colleagues or friends make the mistake of asking me for insights on investing. My usual response over the last few months has been to say, “I’m not much of a stonks guy.”

The crucial thing about stonks is that it sounds goofy. The proper word stocks is polite and almost patrician with its wide-open “aw” syllable. You can practically yawn it. Stonks, in contrast, is an exclamation, a honk of joy or incomprehension that signals that you don’t take any of this finance stuff too seriously, that you are in it as much for the lulz as the opportunity to actually make a buck. It fits the mentality of day traders who see themselves as party crashers screwing with Wall Street, make memes comparing themselves to the Joker or the Avengers, and might brag about purposely buying shares in a company just as it’s about to crash, as if they were purposely getting kicked in the balls on an episode of Jackass.

But the phrase has also caught on because it matches the sense of absurdity that actual professionals often feel about the world of investing. If you try hard enough, it’s possible to make sense of the stock market. Sometimes. There are moments where it’s obvious what’s happening: A company craps out on earnings, and its price falls. There’s a pandemic and so everyone buys shares of Peloton and Zoom.* The Federal Reserve signals interest rates will stay low, so stocks pop. The best reporters who cover equities also know how to trace the shrouded mechanisms that drive the action on some days, and the obscure, algorithm-driven hedge fund strategies that can snowball into a route or just quietly skim cash until someone or another is a billionaire.

But on many days, maybe most days, stocks go up or stocks go down and people are left to make up a rationale for it all, to try and impose a narrative where not much of one may actually exist. On those afternoons, the most honest thing to do is just throw up your hands and post the stonks guy meme. And at a moment that the markets are being overrun, for better or worse, by posters who’ve basically dedicated themselves to shredding the idea that markets are efficient, rational mechanisms for allocating capital and discovering value, tweeting about stonks seems far more appropriate than discussing something as reasonable and comprehensible as stocks. It’s an emotional onomatopoeia for talking about people throwing their money at the market when, lol, nothing matters.

Washington state launches study that could lead to tearing down Snake River dams



Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Patty Murray pledged to keep open minds as they announced Friday a joint federal and state process to see if there are reasonable means to replace the benefits of the lower Snake River Dams.

They expect to make recommendations no later than the end of July.

Breaching or taking down the four dams from Ice Harbor Dam near the Tri-Cities to Lower Granite Dam near Lewiston, Idaho, has been proposed as a way to help endangered salmon.

Inslee foreshadowed the announcement at a Washington Conservation Voters event earlier this month, saying he and Murray would be launching a rigorous, robust and fast assessment of what would be required to replace the benefits of the four dams.

“Both of us believe that, for the region to move forward, the time has come to identify specific details for how the impacts of breach can, or cannot, be mitigated,” Inslee and Murray said in a joint announcement Friday.

They said neither have made a decision on whether there are reasonable ways to replace the benefits of the dams in order to support tearing them down as part of the salmon recovery strategy for the Snake River.

In the coming months they will talk to a wide range of individuals and groups across the Pacific Northwest with varying views on dam breaching, they said.

“This will include close consultation and advisement by treaty-protected tribes whose unique perspectives and sovereignty each of us deeply appreciates,” they said.

Conservation and fisheries groups have called for the dams to be removed to help rebuild populations of salmon that must navigate eight hydroelectric dams between the Idaho and Washington border and the Pacific Ocean.

“Saving our salmon is absolutely essential to Washington state’s economy and cultural heritage. It is an urgent undertaking that we are fully committed to,” Inslee and Murray said.

Breaching focus questioned

But Northwest RiverPartners said it was concerned by Murray and Inslee’s apparent focus on the lower Snake River dams, framing the issue as whether their services can be replaced rather than whether they should be replaced.

“With massive declines in chinook salmon survival up and down in the Pacific Coast over the past 50 years tied to climate change and a warming ocean, the idea of breaching major carbon-free generation infrastructure just doesn’t make sense,” said Kurt Miller, executive director of the nonprofit representing utilities and agriculture and shipping interests that depend on the Snake River dams.

Calls to breach the dams for salmon recovery lack the scientific rigor necessary for such a drastic decision, he said.

“There is still so much we don’t know about salmon and we risk doing more long-term harm than good by breaching the dams, given the context of climate change,” Miller said.

Pacific Northwest Waterways Association pointed out that a $40 million environmental study completed last year concluded that breaching the dams was not in the best interest of society from the perspective of climate, costs and societal benefits, especially given the uncertainty of benefits for salmon.

The association said that shifting shipping from barges on the lower Snake River to trucks and rail would increase carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions annually equivalent to a coal-fired power plant operating for five or six years.

But a coalition of a dozen conservation, fishing and additional groups with similar views on breaching the dams praised Inslee and Murray’s plan.

They said the science on preventing extinction is clear.

Support for breaching dams

“Salmon and steelhead need free-flowing, cold water, which requires removal of the four lower Snake River dams,” they said in a statement.

Nancy Hirsh, executive director of Northwest Energy Coalition said she is confident that energy services provided by the four Snake River hydroelectric dams can be reliably and affordably replaced with effective planning.

“The pressure on the Snake River dams just hit an all-time high” with Inslee and Murray joining to look at replacing their services, said Guilia Good Stefani, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy nonprofit.

“This is a giant step forward for the tribes that have kept the fish on life support all these years and for all of us who care deeply about justice and living in a rich and climate-resilient Northwest,” she said.

The planned quick turnaround of the evaluation recognizes the urgency of the need to save salmon, said Justin Hayes, executive director of the Idaho Conservation League.

“Preserving a place in the Water Resources Development Act to deauthorize the dams makes sense. Endless study does not,” he said.

Murray said she would ensure that key elements of a salmon recovery strategy that comes from cooperation between the state and federal governments are included as part of any Army Corps of Engineers strategy in the Fiscal 2022 Water Resources Development Act.

That could include possible analysis by federal agencies of breaching the four lower Snake River dams as part of a solution, she and Inslee said.

The federal analysis would be necessary to pursue further action with the dams, potentially including breaching, to be included in a future Water Resources Development Act.

“Without this critical step, options that may be essential to salmon restoration could be excluded from the most timely and viable federal legislative vehicle,” they said.

Inslee and Murray said they would be working with both Democrats and Republicans to assess how benefits of the dams could be replaced.

‘Something fishy’

However, Washington state’s Republican U.S. representatives — Dan Newhouse, Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Jamie Herrera Beutler — were skeptical.

“It is becoming more and more clear that the public and stakeholders who rely on the Columbia Snake River System have been shut out of conversations between the Biden administration, federal agencies and groups whose sole mission is to breach the Lower Snake River dams,” they said in a joint statement Friday.

It appears “suspicious at best” that a settlement announced Thursday would halt litigation related to operating eight Columbia and Snake river dams until July, the same time the state and federal review of dam benefits is to be completed, they said.

“This appears to be nothing more than a predetermined backdoor deal in the making ... ,” they said. “There is something fishy going on, and it’s not just the promising salmon returns we are seeing on the lower Snake River.”

A process for written comments to be submitted for the joint federal and state process has yet to be announced.

‘I was terrified’: the vet sterilizing Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos

Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá
Fri, October 22, 2021

Photograph: Joaquín Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images

When Gina Paola Serna studied to become a biologist and veterinarian in Colombia, she never expected to one day be tasked with neutering an invasive herd of hippos that once belonged to Pablo Escobar.

When they were smuggled into the drug lord’s private zoo in the 1980s, there were just four hippos. But in the 26 years since Escobar’s death, their numbers have steadily grown : the herd now includes about 80 animals – threatening to disrupt ecosystems in Colombia. So now, Serna spends her days tracking and sterilizing the hulking riverine mammals.

“The first time I worked with a hippo I was terrified – these are animals way bigger than we are used to working with in Colombia,” Serna said, before another day in the field. “These are massive and territorial animals, so everything is complicated when it comes to working with them.”

The so called “cocaine hippos” were illegally brought to Colombia and kept in a zoo Escobar built on his vast Hacienda Nápoles estate, along the River Magdalena. He brought rhinos, giraffes and zebras to his menagerie. Oral history suggests his associates were wowed by his collection of spectacular beasts of the wild, which included about 200 animals.

A pink statue of a hippo greets tourists at Hacienda Nápoles Park in Puerto Triunfo, Colombia. Hacienda Nápoles was once a private zoo with illegally imported animals that belonged to drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. 

Photograph: Fernando Vergara/AP

But after El Patrón was shot dead by police on a rooftop in his hometown of Medellín, Colombian authorities seized his estate and the animals on it. Most were shipped off to zoos, though the logistics of moving the four hippos – each weighing well over a metric ton – proved insurmountable, and they were left to wander the Andes.

As many as 24 hippos have been sterilized so far, using Gonacon, an immunocontraceptive vaccine, which works temporarily but can cause permanent infertility. Originally, there were calls to cull Colombia’s hippo population, but in the end, sterilization was thought to be the more humane option.

“Obviously you can’t let these hippos keep reproducing, which is what they’ll keep doing because they are in paradise,” said Enrique Zerda Ordóñez, a professor of biology at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, adding: “They’ll always have water, all the plants they could ever want to eat, and they can pop out of the river and eat grass with the cows.”

Rural farmers have grown fond of the wandering herd, charging tourists for a glance at the hippos that bathe on their lands, though one villager was injured last year after getting too close. Animal rights activists and conservationists have also sought to protect the hippos, vehemently protesting any initiatives to cull the animals.

“This is only a pilot project, but something had to be done,” said Robin Poches, a biologist and businessman who helped the Colombian government secure a donation of 70 doses of Gonacon from the United States Department of Agriculture. “Otherwise it’s only a matter of time before someone gets seriously injured or killed.”

The decision to medically sterilize the animals, rather than castrate them, will save money and time-consuming work.

Castrating a hippo is no small feat, and costs about $7,000 for each animal. Hippos spend most of their time submerged in rivers, grazing on underwater flora, and only emerge at night, so the surgery would have to be performed after dark. A hippo’s reproductive organs are internal, so veterinarians have to carry out invasive procedures in order to neuter the animals.

“The surgery itself isn’t the most complicated part – the tricky thing is anaesthetising them,” said Serna, who has castrated six hippos from the herd, knocking them out with tranquilizer darts that pierce 5cm (2in)-thick skin. “It requires a whole team of people and as we don’t have those drugs for such enormous creatures available in Colombia, it is very expensive.”

The hippos are one of many enduring holdovers of Escobar’s reign of terror, which spanned from the late 70s until his death in 1993 and brought widespread murders and kidnappings. But for Serna, the animals should not be associated with the kingpin.

“The hippos are not Escobar’s legacy, they are simply animals that escaped and bred and made a home in an environment that is not their own,” Serna said. “So to me, they don’t have anything to do with Escobar.”

Colombia Shoots Birth Control Darts at Pablo Escobar's Hippos

Thu, October 21, 2021,

This video  Colombia Shoots Birth Control Darts at Pablo Escobar's Hippos (msn.com)

In the 1980s, notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar imported several hippos to his private zoo. At first, Escobar had one male and three female hippos. Escobar died in 1993, and the hippos were abandoned in the years since. Well, over almost 3 decades, the ‘cocaine hippo’ population has grown to approx 80, and biologists are worried about the hippos’ impact on the local environment and community. The Colombian government has tried to neuter the creatures, but traditional surgical sterilization is extremely risky. According to local authorities, only 11 hippos have been sterilized by this method. Now, Colombian environmental officials are trying to shoot the hippos with darts laden with a birth control drug called GonaCon. ‘It is the first time that we are implementing this procedure,’ the regional environmental agency Cornare said in a statement, via CNN. ‘We are going to follow up and monitor it to find out how successful it can be.’

NUCLEAR = GREEN HYDROGEN
The Commercial Case For Green Hydrogen


Editor OilPrice.com
Thu, October 21, 2021

As the world has grown to recognize the seriousness of climate change and the ever-intensifying need to develop new forms of green, clean, energy production, there have been a number of new technologies that have been hyped up in the headlines as the energy of the future, but which never quite got out of the R&D stages. Think algal biofuel, which was all over the news for years, touted as a sort of green-energy silver bullet but which has never been able to reach anything close to commercial viability. Nuclear fusion, too, continues to be the subject of endless news reports and think pieces, but is still lightyears away from being a viable means of energy production. And now, the viability of another green energy wunderkind is being thrown into question: green hydrogen.

Green hydrogen has been the topic of much hope and many R&D efforts as a potentially viable replacement for hot-burning combustion fuels like coking coal, which have proven extremely tricky to replace with greener alternatives. Hydrogen burns extremely hot like fossil fuels but leaves behind nothing but water vapor. This makes it an extremely attractive possibility for high-emissions industries like steelmaking, which continue to rely on huge quantities of coking coal, and which therefore have a problematically enormous carbon footprint.

While hydrogen leaves behind no greenhouse gases when it is combusted, however, the process of making that hydrogen can have its own hefty carbon footprint. Hydrogen is only as green as the energy used to make it. There are quite a few ways of producing hydrogen, and most of them are quite energy-intensive, such as using electrolysis to split water molecules into two hydrogens and one oxygen. Lots of hydrogen is already being produced in this manner, but the electric currents used in the process are most often derived from fossil fuels. This is known as gray hydrogen. Green hydrogen, in theory, is hydrogen made from completely renewable energies. Some industry insiders refer to a third category -- blue hydrogen -- as hydrogen made from natural gas, which has somewhat lower greenhouse gas emissions than oil or gas.

In order to make green hydrogen a commercial fuel source for the future, we will have to have plentiful, and indeed, excess, amounts of green energy. As the current global energy crunch shows, we are a long, long way from that reality. Currently, clean energies make up such a small relative share of the global energy mix that the idea of a large-scale green hydrogen industry is somewhat fantastical.

Just this week, at CNBC’s Sustainable Future Forum, Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said that there is currently “no commercial case” for green hydrogen. “We need to define boundary conditions which make this technology and these cases commercially viable,” Bruch said. “And we need an environment, obviously, of cheap electricity and in this regard, abundant renewable energy available to do this.”

While we’re clearly not there yet, Bruch contended, we could be soon if the right steps are taken. “You need the fine print and the policies to incentivize or make it mandatory: to switch from grey to green, to switch from gas to hydrogen, to switch from coal to hydrogen,” he said. “And then it will happen very fast.”

The transition can’t happen fast enough. Later this month representatives from all over the world are headed to Glasgow for the 26th annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), known as COP26. This is exactly the kind of forum in which big policy transitions and commitments to incentivize promising green energy technologies like green hydrogen can materialize in an actionable way. While there is still a lot of work to be done before green hydrogen could become a commercial reality, there is no time to waste. Helping industries like steelmaking go green with the help of hydrogen would be a huge step forward and an invaluable development for battling climate change.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Biden delays release of secret JFK assassination files

Daniel Chaitin, Misty Severi

WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Fri, October 22, 2021

President Joe Biden ordered yet another delay in the release of secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy yet to see the light of day more than 50 years after his death.

A White House memo, signed by Biden, said "[t]emporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure."

The order comes in response to the archivist of the United States recommending the president “temporarily certify the continued withholding of all of the information certified in 2018” and “direct two public releases of the information that has” ultimately “been determined to be appropriate for release to the public,” with one interim release on Dec. 15 and one more comprehensive release in late 2022, according to the memo.

Former President Donald Trump ordered in 2018 that documentation still under wraps stay redacted for national security reasons, with a deadline of Oct. 26, 2021. His administration said the decision was made at the behest of the intelligence community.

This time around, delays associated with the coronavirus pandemic were to blame for the recommendation to put off the release.

David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, reported “unfortunately, the pandemic has had a significant impact on the agencies” and National Archives and Records Administration, the White House memo said.

NARA “require[s] additional time to engage with the agencies and to conduct research within the larger collection to maximize the amount of information released," added the memo, which also said the archivist noted that “making these decisions is a matter that requires a professional, scholarly, and orderly process; not decisions or releases made in haste.”

Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Oswald was arrested and charged with the killings of Kennedy and Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. The 24-year-old denied shooting Kennedy, claiming he was a "patsy," before he was shot dead soon after on national television by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

According to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush in an attempt to minimize conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death, the Congress declared, “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ... should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.”

Congress also found at the time that “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”

Tens of thousands of the JFK assassination documents, with varying levels of redactions, have already been released.

Among the information that has not been made public are highly sensitive details about U.S. operations against Cuba in 1963, according to the Intercept. There are also unseen passages about surveillance techniques that detected Oswald's visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City weeks before Kennedy's assassination.

"Since the 1990s, more than 250,000 records concerning President Kennedy’s assassination — more than 90 percent of NARA’s collection — have been released in full to the public. Only a small fraction of the records contains any remaining redactions," the memo said.

A lot of the information that has been made available to the public is not accessible online. Under the order Friday, Biden instructed the archivist to issue a plan for the digitization of the records by Dec. 15.

DO NOT LET THIS WOMAN FIND BIGFOOT  
Hunter had never seen a bear in Missouri. Then she killed a 268-pounder, officials say



Mike Stunson
Fri, October 22, 2021

A hunter’s patience paid off as she became the first woman to bag a bear this hunting season in Missouri.

The Missouri Department of Conservation said Kelsie Wikoff, of Hume, spent 48 hours in a tree stand while she was hunting.

Her reward was a 268-pound male bear, which officials say she killed Thursday.

Wikoff would not reveal her hunting location on Facebook, but said she intends to mount the full body of the bear. She said she had never seen a bear in the state before, except on trail cameras.

“So thankful for all the people and support along the way,” the hunter said on Facebook, calling the harvesting “rewarding.”

Missouri is home to about 800 black bears, with officials saying a highly-regulated hunting season is essential to managing the bear population.

Bear season in Missouri is from Oct. 18 to Oct. 27. Officials said Friday nine hunters have harvested a bear this season.

#STOPBEARHUNTS

#ENDPREDATORHUNTING

The Backstory: Long before the Champlain Towers collapse, there was money laundering. Here's how we uncovered it.


Chris Davis, USA TODAY
Fri, October 22, 2021

When USA TODAY investigative reporter Monique O. Madan sat down to handwrite the letter, she didn’t hold out much hope for a response.

“Dear Mr. Rosello,” she started. “I know this is totally random, and I’m sorry to cold call you (or cold mail you.) I’m working on a story about Champlain Tower and I think you can help.”

Madan and five of her colleagues had been trying for months to track down former residents of the South Florida condominium building that had collapsed in June, killing 98 people in one of the biggest and most tragic stories of the year.

People observe the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South condo in Surfside, Fla., on June 25, 2021.

They wanted to know what people remembered about the earliest days of the condo tower. When did people first start noticing problems with the building? How did the homeowners’ association and government regulators respond to flooding in the building and to signs of crumbling concrete? Had someone made mistakes when the building was built?

But the effort wasn’t going well. The whole team was starting to wonder if anyone would be willing to talk.

“I made 160 phone calls to former residents and I got one person to talk to me for more than five minutes,” said Pat Beall, a veteran investigative reporter working for USA TODAY in South Florida.

Pedro “Peggy” Rosello was just one more name on a list of former residents. But he stood out on that list because of his current address: a federal prison cell in Miami.
We knew the Surfside story started long before the building's collapse. So we went back to the beginning.

Like many other news organizations, USA TODAY – and its affiliated local newsrooms across Florida – rushed reporters to the tiny town of Surfside when the building collapsed. We wrote dozens of stories about the rescue efforts and told our readers about the people who lost their lives. In the earliest days of the tragedy, our reporters uncovered important factors that might have contributed to the collapse, including the fact the building had been sinking into the sand unusually quickly.

At the same time, we gathered a group of reporters from the USA TODAY investigations team to chase the story in a different way. We wanted to go back to the beginning and trace as many details as we could find about what people knew and when. This is a tried and true technique of investigative journalism. Events happen now, but often the crucial context lives in the past. It’s part of our job to piece the whole story together by gathering up the witnesses to those past events.

READ THE INVESTIGATION: Left to rot: Collapsed condo born of botched construction and evidence of money laundering

Our reporters started with a list of people culled from public records including deeds and mortgages for each unit in Champlain South. They reached out to current residents, too, and gained access to a trove of documents produced by the building’s homeowners’ association, which for years had been grappling with how to pay to repair crumbling concrete and other problems.

They began looking through public records that are generated from real estate transactions. Deeds filed in local courthouses show who buys a property and whether they borrowed money for the purchase. Those records also show the purchase price and who put up the money for the mortgage.

Dan Keemahill, a reporter on USA TODAY’s data team, examined sales records en masse. He analyzed 30,000 condo sales in the area to compare prices at Champlain South over time with those of other nearby condo buildings.
Over days and weeks, the reporters started to notice a pattern.

Instead of individual people buying condos and borrowing from a traditional bank, they were seeing purchases from LLCs – corporate entities that can obscure who is behind a real estate deal. Many buyers were coming from overseas or were listing P.O. boxes as their primary address. Some of the mortgages were issued by an attorney who worked for the developer.

“As I’m pulling these deeds, I’m trying to explain to myself what the legitimate reasons could be,” Beall said. “Once you started plugging in names of the corporations … you kept getting total dead ends. Here’s a corporation and there is no other information about it.”

Money laundering has long been a part of real estate in South Florida. Money made from criminal enterprises, including from cartels in Central and South America, gets pushed through real estate purchases in a way that eventually makes the money appear to be legally earned.

Experts told our reporters that money laundering associated with a building could affect the quality of construction and repairs in at least two ways. First, if developers are willing to launder money, they may also be willing to cut corners on construction. And second, if buyers are primarily in the market to wash their money, they may not care what happens long-term to the building they are buying into.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, when Champlain South rose from the coastline, Miami was awash in money from the booming drug trade. Money laundering was rampant.

"The era we’re talking about is when Miami suddenly came out of the ashes. So how do you rush to fulfill the demand? You cut corners. You attached roofs with paper clips. You bribe the inspectors," said Jorge Valdes, who was not involved in Champlain South but helped build dozens of homes, apartment complexes and high-rises in the Miami region as a chief money launderer for the Medellin Cartel.
More telltale signs of money laundering at Champlain South emerged from our review of sales data.

When the developers first started selling units around 1980, the prices were inflated compared with units in other towers selling nearby. Over time, the average price per square foot in the tower evened out and then dropped compared with other condo buildings – evidence that buyers began to notice the building falling into disrepair.

As Beall dug through deeds, she found one signed by Herbert Batliner, an investment adviser from Liechtenstein who had been investigated by German authorities for helping clients evade taxes. Another unit was bought by a couple listing a Panama P.O. box as their home address. To pay for it, they borrowed money from Stanley Levine, the Canadian lawyer who represented Champlain South’s developer. Within a few months of purchase, the couple stopped paying their assessments and a lien was placed on their unit.

Levine had his own problems, records show.

He had been indicted after being accused of attempting to bribe an official in Florida on an earlier project. Reporters also learned from other media accounts that one building contractor hired to work on the Champlain South project was forced to surrender his license after numerous infractions. The architect’s license had been suspended in Florida after sign structures he designed collapsed during Hurricane Betsy in 1965.

And then there was Rosello.

In the Netflix docuseries "Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami," director Billy Corben lays out Rosello’s time as a notorious drug smuggler working alongside the likes of Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta. The series describes the high-rolling lifestyle of drug smugglers in South Florida. In one scene, a photo of Rosello lying in a bed inside his Champlain South unit holds the screen as the narrator speaks.

The location is not mentioned in the series, but Corben connected the dots in a Twitter post not long after the tower collapsed. Our reporters noted the post and interviewed Corben.

It was yet another hint at what might have been happening in the early days of Champlain South -- and another name for reporters to add to their pile.

By now, the reporting team had called hundreds of people and sifted through thousands of pages of records. Erin Mansfield, a reporter on USA TODAY’s quick-strike investigations team, was writing letter after letter by hand, in English and Spanish, trying to find residents willing to talk. Fellow reporters Katie Wedell and Sudiksha Kochi had all but reached the end of their list of possible contacts.
“The fact that nobody wanted to talk, I think it really speaks to the trauma that this story carries. It’s one like no other,” Madan said. “They felt very naked. They didn’t feel like talking about it. They didn’t see any point to it.”

The reporters kept writing and calling.

Rosello received Madan’s first letter in his prison cell, but he didn’t respond.

“I thought maybe he was flooded with letters because this documentary had come out,” Madan said. “I thought my letter would get lost in fan mail or whatever.”

A second letter got her a little closer. Rosello’s best friend called to screen Madan, asking what kinds of questions she wanted to ask and looking for previous stories she had written. Madan told her she had been a longtime reporter in Miami and that she was committed to the story because it was important. It was personal.

“I just wanted to make clear to him that I care deeply about the stories that we tell,” Madan said.

Still, Rosello didn’t call.

Madan tried a third letter and was researching what it would take to arrange a meeting at the prison when her cellphone rang. She didn’t recognize the number.

Rosello's voice came softly through the speaker: “My girl told me I could trust you.”

Over the next few weeks, Madan said, she talked to Rosello roughly 20 times. Each time, because of prison rules, the conversation lasted no more than 15 minutes.

Rosello talked of how, in the early days, Champlain South offered an under-the-radar refuge where cocaine dealing, Ferraris and indoor hot tub parties abounded. When he arrived there in 1988 as a renter, the luxury condo on Collins Avenue was a hub where kingpins partied, out of sight of undercover police.

“All the attention was still on South Beach, so I could walk into an elevator knowing nobody would catch on to me,” he told Madan. “But at the end, the building fell, just like our once cocaine empire.”