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Lawsuit Against US Fish and Wildlife Seeks to Protect California Spotted Owls From Logging (Maria)
The author writes, “A Northern California environmental group filed a lawsuit Thursday against the US Fish and Wildlife Service over its approval of a logging plan that it says could lead to the deaths of hundreds of spotted owls and the birds’ potential extinction. The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento federal court by the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center, targets the federal agency over a September 2020 permit issued to Sierra Pacific Industries for its plans to conduct logging operations on more than 1.5 million acres of Northern California over a 50-year period. ‘We’re trying to prevent the extinction of the species,’ said Tom Wheeler, executive director and staff attorney for the nonprofit group. … The northern spotted owl is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the California spotted owl was proposed for the same classification earlier this year.”
What It’s Like to Take Over the Statue of Liberty (Laura)
From The Nation: “Hundreds of Jewish Voice for Peace members calling for a Gaza cease-fire occupied the pedestal of the statue. This is how it happened.”
America’s Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist (Reader Jim)
From The Atlantic: “Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.”
City Ordinance Banning Public Homosexuality Reaches Rutherford County Libraries (Dana)
The author writes, “A municipal mandate enacted this past June in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is now being used to target books in the local library system. The ordinance, outlawing ‘indecent behavior’ in public and prohibiting ‘indecent materials,’ is alarmingly vague in its delineation of indecency. This definition used in the law links back to a city statute that explicitly bans public homosexuality or materials promoting homosexuality. The code has already been used to target local Pride events. Now, the code’s enforcement has reached the local library system, where at least four books, all containing LGBTQ+ themes, have been pulled from the shelves.”
Japanese Americans Were Jailed in a Desert. Survivors Fear Wind Farm Will Erase the Past (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Behind the barbed wire, the little boy pressed his ink-covered index finger onto the mint-green exit card. And a photograph was snapped of his frightened face. Paul Tomita was 4. It was July 4, 1943. Independence Day at Minidoka, a camp in the vast desert where 13,000 Japanese American men, women and children were incarcerated during World War II as security risks because of their ancestry. The wallet-size paper meant the scared boy in the photo could leave after 11 months living in a cramped barracks with his father, mother, two sisters and grandmother. Eight decades later, he returned with West Coast pilgrims who think the life-changing atrocity should be remembered. But now another government decision looms as a threat — a wind project that they worry will destroy the experience they want to preserve.”
Baby Dolphins Found to Receive High Doses of Persistent Organic Pollutants From Their Mothers’ Milk (Mili)
The author writes, “A team of marine biologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, working with a pair of colleagues from the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, has found that dolphin calves born to mothers in the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program consume milk that contains high amounts of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).”
Vampire Viruses Prey on Other Viruses to Replicate Themselves — And May Hold the Key to New Antiviral Therapies (Sean)
From The Conversation: “Have you ever wondered whether the virus that gave you a nasty cold can catch one itself? It may comfort you to know that, yes, viruses can actually get sick. Even better, as karmic justice would have it, the culprits turn out to be other viruses. Viruses can get sick in the sense that their normal function is impaired. When a virus enters a cell, it can either go dormant or start replicating right away. When replicating, the virus essentially commandeers the molecular factory of the cell to make lots of copies of itself, then breaks out of the cell to set the new copies free.”
