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Officials Say Illegal Pesticide Caused Deaths Of 13 Bald Eagles In Maryland

A bald eagle flies over its nest in Middle River, Md., in 2009.


Farmers can be painted with a stereotypical salt of the earth wholesome image, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s a dark, selfish, and nasty side to many of them. Here’s one example.

by Vanessa Romo

NPR – June 22, 2018

Robert Edgell has grown accustomed to seeing bald eagles soar over the family farm in Federalsburg, Md., so, when he discovered the carcasses of more than a dozen dead raptors on the property two years ago, he “was dumbfounded,” he told The Washington Post.

“Usually you see one or two soaring over the place, but to see 13 in that area and all deceased. … In all my years, I’d not seen anything like this,” Edgell said.

What could have caused the destruction of so many of the birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, he wondered?

The question was taken up by U.S. Fish and Wildlife authorities, who collected six of the 13 dead eagles. Almost immediately, they suspected poisoning as the cause of death.

They were right.

A 2016 necropsy report only recently obtained by radio station WNAV confirmed all six died after ingesting carbofuran, a pesticide banned by the Environmental Protection Agency beginning in the 1990s.

“Carbofuran was detected in the stomach and/or crop contents of all birds,” the report reads, adding that the pesticide also was found in the partial carcass of a raccoon and fur recovered from the site. Researchers found that five of the six eagles had consumed a recent meal that included raccoon. Other species ingested included marsh rice rat, domestic chicken and deer.

At the time the report was issued, authorities announced they were “intending to close the case in the near future due to a lack of evidence linking anyone to the crime.” No arrests have been made. Killing a bald eagle a felony crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

The granular form of carbofuran was banned 1991 partly due the the devastation it wreaked on avian wildlife. Officials estimated it was responsible for killing more than a million birds that mistook the toxic insecticide for grain seeds or consumed small animals that had eaten carbouran pellets. The liquid form was banned by the EPA in 2009.

“Carbofuran is so acutely toxic that animals have succumbed to it with just food in the mouth,” Mourad Gabriel, co-director of the Integral Ecology Research Center, told NPR. “Sometimes we find animals where the food material is undigested — mid-esophagus.”

Gabriel said illegal use of the pesticide by farmers and landowners “creates a vicious cycle of death from even just one poisoning.”

In California, illegal marijuana growers trying to protect their crops from animals are known to set “bait piles” laced with the liquid chemical, Gabriel said. Grey foxes, bears and turkeys there often are the first victims.

“Next come the vultures and other birds who consume the carrion, which later fly away and die some short distance away. Flies then lay eggs in those carcasses, which become poisoned food for other avian birds to feed on.”

John LaCorte, a special agent for the Fish and Wildlife Service told The Washington Post there is an “epidemic on the Eastern Shore” of wildlife-poisoning crimes because people find it “cheaper and easier” than trapping a nuisance animal or predator or building a fence.

La Corte, who spent six months interviewing more than a dozen people in connection to the dead eagles, said the cases are hard to solve because there rarely any witnesses, if any.

“If anyone wants to see things get done about this, they need to be courageous and come forward,” he said.


https://www.npr.org/2018/06/22/622741047/officials-say-illegal-pesticide-killed-13-bald-eagles-in-maryland?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app

Behind Trump’s Plan to Overhaul the Government: Scaling Back the Safety Net

Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, on Thursday at the White House. The plan to overhaul the government would make social welfare programs easier to cut.


The related stories to this current article are staggering in their volume and focus.

DeVos, Mulvaney, Pruitt, along with others in the Trump administration, who support them, become as close to defacto evil, as human beings can get, when their judgement suffers from the severe long-term damage of poor upbringing, childhood trauma, and quite probably, mental illness. That’s as polite as I can put it in trying to explain the actions of these people without using the usual epithets.


By Glenn Thrush and Erica L. Green
• June 21, 2018

WASHINGTON — President Trump, spurred on by conservatives who want him to slash safety net programs, unveiled on Thursday a plan to overhaul the federal government that could have a profound effect on millions of poor and working-class Americans.

Produced over the last year by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, it would reshuffle social welfare programs in a way that would make them easier to cut, scale back or restructure, according to several administration officials involved in the planning.

Among the most consequential ideas is a proposal to shift the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a subsistence benefit that provides aid to 42 million poor and working Americans, from the Agriculture Department to a new mega-agency that would have “welfare” in its title — a term Mr. Trump uses as a pejorative catchall for most government benefit programs.

That proposal, which includes an equally ambitious plan to merge the Education and Labor Departments to consolidate work force programs, is not likely to gain the congressional approval needed to make the changes, Mr. Mulvaney’s aides conceded in a phone call with reporters on Thursday.

But the rollout has a bigger long-term purpose, said Margaret Weichert, one of Mr. Mulvaney’s deputies who drafted the proposal. She cast the proposal as a rallying cry for “small government” and said the audacity of the plan proved “why many Americans voted for this president.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, joked on Thursday that the plan was “extraordinarily boring” before TV cameras in the Cabinet Room.

But being boring in an all-too-exciting White House has provided cover for a small army of conservatives and think tank veterans who have been quietly churning out dozens of initiatives like the proposal to reshuffle the cabinet, with the ultimate goal of dismantling the American social welfare system from the inside out.

“Our guys have been in there since the start, grinding it out, and basically no one is noticing it except the smart liberals like Rachel Maddow,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former adviser, who believes the attack on social programs will be one of Mr. Trump’s most enduring policy achievements.

“It is one of the reasons Trump is at like 97 percent with the base. This is what the base wants,” he said. Referring to the right-wing conspiracy theorist who hosts a popular radio show and the progressive consumer activists allied with Ralph Nader, who became a force in Democratic politics in the 1970s, he added: “Trust me, it’s not Alex Jones that’s driving things. It’s these guys — they are our version of ‘Nader’s Raiders.’
Philip G. Alston, a New York University professor and the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, agreed with Mr. Bannon’s assessment. “My sense is they are making very considerable progress, even though no one is paying much attention,” he said.

But Mr. Alston, author of a recent study on endemic poverty in American cities and the rural South, has a different view of what Mr. Trump’s aides are trying to do. “There is a contempt for the poor that seems to permeate the president’s inner circle that seems very worrying,” he said. “It’s done under the banner of providing opportunity and seeking long-term solutions but it all seems designed to increase misery.”

The president himself is deeply uninterested in the details of policy and can identify only a handful of domestic policy aides, including Mr. Mulvaney, by name, according to current and former staff members. His policy operation during the 2016 campaign was skeletal.

Aides would often watch Mr. Trump’s stump speech on TV for cues on what he wanted to do, search Google for policy proposals that seemed to be the closest fit — then draft white papers or debate talking points from the results.
As president, Mr. Trump would become so bored with the details of domestic policy that aides long ago stopped sharing all but the most top-line specifics of their plans — including the reorganization, according to several people who have worked closely with Mr. Trump.

If Mr. Trump is fuzzy on policy, he is acutely attuned to the perils of offending his base, especially older voters.

A few weeks after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Mulvaney and a handful of other aides, including Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff, approached the president in the Oval Office to suggest a slate of entitlement changes to reduce costs in the Medicare and Social Security programs.

They were a few minutes into their pitch, according to someone familiar with the meeting, when Mr. Trump waved a dismissive hand and shouted, “No way! What else you got?”

Mr. Trump has, however, given wide latitude to conservatives like the education secretary, Betsy DeVos; the housing secretary, Ben Carson; Attorney General Jeff Sessions; the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Andrew Bremberg; and Mr. Mulvaney, who has emerged as the most provocative and hyperactive of the president’s senior policy advisers.

Mrs. Devos has been especially aggressive, pushing to loosen restrictions on for-profit colleges and enforcement of civil rights laws. She is close to Mr. Mulvaney and supported the proposal to merge her department with the Labor Department, calling it a “bold reform” in a statement.

“Artificial barriers between education and work force programs have existed for far too long,” she added.

Democratic critics saw the new proposal as a threat to both departments, but the proposal also divided conservatives.
Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the Republican chairwoman of the House education committee who has aggressively pushed a higher education bill that would achieve the same goals, said it was “a recognition of the clear relationship between education policy at every level and the needs of the growing American work force.”

But it was one of the rare proposals that fell flat with conservative supporters who champion Mr. Trump’s agenda to shrink the government, in part because it did not include an accounting of staff members or funding for the reorganization.
Lindsey Burke, the education policy director at the Heritage Foundation, which has steered a slew of Trump policies, said that the proposal risked increasing the federal government’s role in education and the work force, creating more “bloat, control and federal tentacles in local schools and markets.”

For the most part, however, operatives aligned with Heritage, the Federalist Society and the sprawling Koch brothers network have been on the inside making policy.
Benjamin Hobbs, a former employee of Heritage and the Charles Koch Foundation, who received a top policy job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was a driving force behind a proposal to raise rents on some of the poorest residents of subsidized housing by as much as 44 percent, according to two administration officials.
In a recent meeting, Mr. Hobbs raised eyebrows by claiming the increases were intended, in part, to persuade unmarried couples to move in with each other to pool rent payments, according to two people in attendance.

Mr. Carson, his boss, broadly supports the idea of reducing dependence, aides said, but was lukewarm on the idea. The backlash to the proposal was so severe that Mr. Carson, speaking this month in Detroit, wavered when asked whether he planned to back legislation needed to achieve the hikes.

Rick Dearborn, another former employee at Heritage, who served as deputy chief of staff for Mr. Trump during his first year in office, steered a total of about 70 Heritage-linked experts into policy roles in the White House and various cabinet departments.
At the same time, Mr. Bannon, who was Mr. Trump’s most influential aide at the dawn of the presidency, enlisted one of Heritage’s founders, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., to help create a list of action items on scaling back social welfare programs days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Heritage had just received a multimillion-dollar commitment from Mr. Bannon’s former benefactor, Rebekah Mercer, according to two people familiar with the gift. Much of the cash was informally earmarked, they said, to help Mr. Trump expand his near nascent policy operation, according to two people familiar with the details of the donation.

By early 2017, Heritage produced a government reorganization plan that served as the initial template for Thursday’s announcement. They also drafted a list of 334 policy recommendations, about half of them aimed at domestic programs for poor people or Obama-era regulations protecting low-income consumers.

“Once the transition started, we seized on the opportunity to help out and define the policy agenda of the next administration,” said Paul Winfree, a social policy expert at Heritage, who once worked for the Domestic Policy Council coordinating administration policy of social welfare programs and entitlements.

“Even when many thought Trump had no chance, Heritage researchers and alumni were working hard over on implementation plans,” said Mr. Winfree. “We went to work while much attention was paid to the palace intrigue or on personalities. Having one big personality isn’t enough to change a government. Having many good people, who know and trust each other, in the right places is the key.”

The core of Mr. Trump’s safety net policy is an expansion of work requirements to foster self-sufficiency among recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and housing subsidies to reduce dependence on the government. “Our goal is to get people on the path to self-sufficiency,” Mr. Bremberg said.

Its real purpose, advocates for poor people claim, is to kick hundreds of thousands of the needy off the federal rolls, to cut taxes for the rich.
That effort dovetailed with a separate but related rollback in the enforcement of fair housing, educational equity, payday lending and civil rights cases pursued aggressively under the Obama administration intended to protect vulnerable populations from discrimination and abusive business practices.
“It’s a war on the poor, pure and simple,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which has challenged several Trump administration policies in federal court.

The pace of administration activity in all of these areas has picked up sharply this year, in part because many of the conservatives inside the administration believe Mr. Trump’s political and legal troubles will limit their window for action after the midterm elections.

Over the last two weeks alone, Mr. Trump’s team unsuccessfully tried to ram through a $15 billion bill clawing back domestic spending, Mr. Mulvaney fired the 25-member advisory board at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he serves as the acting director, and administration lawyers challenged an Obama-era anti-discrimination rule that resulted in greater funding for projects in minority neighborhoods.

What remains unclear is whether the flurry of activity will have a long-term effect on the trajectory of federal spending and the management of safety net programs.
This year, the Heritage Foundation reported that Mr. Trump had checked off 64 percent of their policy checklist. But dozens of those victories were partial or pyrrhic.
Some proposals, including Medicaid waivers that allow states to impose work requirements and the reorientation of enforcement across an array of federal agencies, are moving ahead despite court challenges. But many others, especially those in Mr. Mulvaney’s dead-on-arrival budget proposals, have been blocked by Democrats with the help of Senate Republicans.

As Mr. Mulvaney was pitching his reorganization plan to the cabinet and news media on Thursday, the House was passing a farm bill that included stiffer work requirements for SNAP recipients. Senate Republicans have already vowed to kill that provision.
A handful of Mr. Mulvaney’s recommendations, including changes to federal personnel management and State Department overseas aid programs, can be accomplished through executive action alone.

But many other parts of Mr. Mulvaney’s reorganization plan are likely to face similar resistance as work requirements, including efforts to consolidate fisheries and wildlife programs, aggregate food safety and inspection programs in the Agriculture Department, shift rural housing programs to HUD and move the Army Corps of Engineers to civilian agencies, among others.

“This is an art-of-the-possible exercise,” Ms. Weichert said.

Anthony Bourdain, Chef and Gifted Storyteller

Anthony Bourdain, Chef and Gifted Storyteller


Anthony Bourdain was a refreshing breakaway from the huge crop of foodie chefs that rained down on restaurant and eating culture from the 1990s on.
For nearly twenty years after retiring from the grinding restaurant business, he lived his loves of food, travel, writing, and pushing boundaries, as an edgy poet eager to say anything, and everything he felt about the small, and large world around him.
Bourdain contributed volumes of eloquence and insight from the many roads of life he traveled. His steady TV presence kept me company over many meals inspired by his passion, as did his cultural narratives that lulled me to sleep dreaming of following his footsteps. I will miss every bit of this… a lot.
Maybe what I will miss most is the gift of his desire simply to share it all with us. 😔


Related: https://www.npr.org/…/anthony-bourdain-chef-and-television-…Anthony

Apple Aims To Help Parents Crack Down On Kids’ iPhone Use


 A child plays with a mobile phone while riding in a New York subway in December. Two major Apple investors urged the iPhone maker to take action to curb growing smartphone use among children.

Ok…fine, but if parents cave to their kids’ whining, and pouting when it’s time for lockdown, it won’t matter. For many of the kids who are fixated to mobile devices and/or social media, fixing the problem has been undermined by their parents’ addiction, or unwillingness to clamp down. The ship has sailed on helping older teens and young adults already captured take in the world beyond a phone screen. Hopefully, the next generation might regain the ability to straighten their necks, and look up.


Laura Sydell/NPR

June 4, 2018

Apple on Monday announced a new app to allow users to get reports on how much their kids are using particular apps on their iPhones and iPads.

Apple is calling the app Screen Time, and it will let parents set time limits on how long their children can use apps, from Netflix to Snapchat, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Screen Time would also allow parents to limit access to some apps and websites. One option is designed to get kids to unplug from their devices at bedtime.

The new feature — announced at the company’s annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif. — will be part of the next Apple mobile operating system, iOS 12, which is expected out later this year.

Users will now be able to get a few summary of the time they spend on the phone and how long they are on certain apps. Users will also be able to set a time limit for themselves on a particular app.

“We know, this is something that can help families achieve the right balance for them,” Federighi said.

In an interview Monday with NPR, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “We have never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of times you use it.

“All of these things are great conveniences of life,” he said. “They change your daily life in a great way. But if you’re being bombarded by notifications all day long, that’s probably a use of the system that might not be so good anymore.”

Apple also launched a “Families” webpage in March, outlining ways in which parents can utilize the company’s pre-existing features.

“We first introduced parental controls for iPhone in 2008, and our team has worked thoughtfully over the years to add features to help parents manage their children’s content,” Federighi said.

Apple’s announcement Monday follows pressure from activist shareholders to take the lead in developing controls to help parents limit iPhone use by teens and children.

In January, Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, wrote a letter to Apple about growing “societal unease” about overuse of technology and in particular smart phones, which at some point could turn people away from buying Apple products. They called upon Apple to take a stronger role in helping parents control their children’s use of electronic devices.

CalSTRS and Jana, which, combined, owned about $2 billion in Apple stock, say the company could help minimize “unintentional negative consequences” of overusing digital devices and spending too much time on social media.

Charles Penner, a partner with Jana Partners, said the investment firm sees Apple’s latest moves as positive.

“We’re still reviewing it, but Apple appears to have addressed the vast majority of our concerns, and we look forward to seeing their follow-through,” Penner said.

One study by nonprofit group Common Sense Media said that 78 percent of teens check their phones at least hourly and 50 percent report feeling “addicted” to their phones.

Right now, controls give two options — all on or all off. Shareholders want more options for controls that help with screen-time management. They also requested that Apple convene a panel to study the issue.

Monday’s announcement addresses some of the concerns of the shareholders.

Apple’s initiative is the latest push from technology companies under pressure to address smartphone addiction.

“We need to have tools and data to allow us to understand how we consume digital media,” Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple executive, told Bloomberg in May. “We need to get finer-grain language and start to understand that an iPhone is just a refrigerator, it’s not the addiction.”

Google announced similar controls in May for its Android P operating system, which include expanded do-not-disturb controls and ways to track app usage. Google introduced a “wind down” mode that changes the screen’s brightness and color scale later in the evenings. The new software will also allow users to set time limits on apps, similar to what Apple plans to roll out.


Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/06/04/616833880/apple-aims-to-help-parents-crack-down-on-kids-iphone-use?sc=17&f=1001&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=app

Another WHY not asked by surface reporting.