Sad news from Mozambique: Illegal poachers have killed all the rhinos in Limpopo National Park, a large wildlife reserve in the southeast African country, according to news reports.

Park director António Abacar was quoted as saying this week that no rhinos had been seen since January, "which means that the ones that lived in the park are probably dead," according to the Portugal News.

With all the rhinos gone, poachers are now turning to elephants for their tusks. The horns and tusks are valued for their supposed medicinal value, despite the fact that horns are made of the same basic material as fingernails, with no healing properties.

The park spans 4,247 square miles (11,000 square kilometers), an area more than twice the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island.

Meanwhile, Scientific American reports that for the first time in 33 years, a hunter has been allowed to import a trophy into the United States from a black rhino he shot in Namibia, outraging conservationists.

Two six-year-old school girls have been raped, one strangled to death, in the latest horrendous sex crime to plague Asia's third largest economy.

Police said the body of a young girl was found bleeding in an under-construction building in Ranchi district of the eastern state of Jharkhand on Thursday. The victim's neck and feet had been tied with a string.

"Prima facie it appears that the child was raped. We are waiting for the medical report for confirmation," the deputy superintendent of the local police force said.

Apparently I am farmed and dangerous...

But I am not a criminal. I'm a shepherd, farmer and writer who has been preserving rare Shropshire sheep for the last 12 years, and farming various other heritage breeds and vegetables for the last 30.

Then the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) killed my beautiful ewes and their unborn lambs to find out if they were healthy. They were.

They were also rare and pregnant. Now they are dead.


The CFIA ignored over 5,000 people who signed a petition to stop them . Their policy must change to protect our heritage breeds and heirloom seeds - I need to keep going and ensure they don't destroy me, my farm or other small farms.

The domino effect since has been devastating, its been a downward spiral from their first raid, and worse with every invasion since. I keep telling myself "There are worse things", and I hang on.

The CFIA charged myself and raw milk activist farmer Michael Schmidt and 2 others with numerous criminal charges including conspiracy, for allegedly trying to save Canada's heritage sheep and preserve our country's agricultural biodiversity.

I barely scraped through winter and now, I face imminent foreclosure and an astonishing $100,000. Dollar legal defense fee for the upcoming criminal trial. I have no income, no transportation, am battling depression and post traumatic stress.

If convicted, I face up to 12 YEARS IN JAIL and fines of $1.5 million.

If I lose the farm - they win. And that is just wrong...another wrong added to the CFIA's long list of nonsensical wrongs.
It's not easy to admit, but pride aside - I need help.

Mobile Fire and Rescue Department: More explosions a concern

Mobile, Alaabama - UPDATE: 10:07 p.m. - Mobile Mayor Sam Jones said Mobile Fire-Rescue will let the fire burn out on its own to prevent further injuries.

9:50 p.m. - A fourth explosion just occurred around 9:50 p.m. in a fuel barge fire on the east side of the Mobile River.

The Mobile Fire and Rescue Department said three were injured when two barges previously loaded with liquid natural gas exploded and caught fire. Officials said units are on the scene on the east side of Mobile River.

Lt. Mike Clawson said two natural gas barges exploded, the first occurring around 8:30 p.m. at 200 Dunlap Drive, near Austal.

It happened between the Bankhead Tunnel and the waterways - not near the Carnival Triumph.

The general manager of Ft. Conde Inn, Alan Waugh, saw and heard the explosion when it happened.

"We were up on a second floor balcony and the sky lit up in orange and yellow. My partner was on one end of the balcony and I was on the other. And you thought it was the Carnival cruise ship first, but then you realized it was a little further from the ship. It sounded like planes above you dropping bombs when it first went off."

He said they could feel the rumble, as well as the heat, from the explosion.

The world is heading into a horrific economic nightmare, and an inordinate amount of the suffering is going to fall on innocent children. If you want to get an idea of what America is going to look like in the not too distant future, just check out what is happening in Greece. At this point, Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic depression.

As I have written about previously, the unemployment rate in Greece has now risen to 27 percent, which is much higher than the peak unemployment rate that the U.S. economy experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And as you will read about below, child hunger is absolutely exploding in Greece right now. Some families are literally trying to survive on pasta and ketchup. But don't think for a moment that it can't happen here. Sadly, the truth is that child hunger is already rising very rapidly in our poverty-stricken cities.

Never before have we had so many Americans unable to take care of themselves. Food stamp enrollment and child homelessness have soared to brand new all-time records, and there are actually thousands of Americans that are so poor that they live in tunnels underneath our cities. But for millions of other Americans, the suffering is not quite so dramatic.

Instead, they just watch their hopes and their dreams slowly slip away as they struggle to find a way to make it from month to month. There are millions of parents that lead lives that are filled with constant stress and anxiety as they try to figure out how to provide the basics for their children. How do you tell a child that you can't give them any dinner even though you have been trying as hard as you can? What many families go through on a regular basis is absolutely heartbreaking. Unfortunately, more poor families slip through the cracks with each passing day, and these are supposedly times in which we are experiencing an "economic recovery".

So what are things going to look like when the next major economic downturn strikes?

The Obama Administration and a federal judge in San Francisco appear to be headed for a showdown over the controversial state secrets privilege in a case about the U.S. government's 'no-fly' list for air travel.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup is also bucking the federal government's longstanding assertion that only the executive branch can authorize access to classified information.

The disputes arose in a lawsuit Malaysian citizen and former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim filed seven years ago after she was denied travel and briefly detained at the San Francisco airport in 2005, apparently due to being on the no-fly list.

In an order issued earlier this month and made public Friday, Alsup instructed lawyers for the government to "show cause" why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers. Alsup said he'd examined the documents and concluded that portions of some of them and the entirety of others could be shown to Ibrahim's attorneys without implicating national security.

"After a careful review of the classified materials by the Court, this order concludes that a few documents could potentially be produced with little or no modifications to them," Alsup wrote in an April 2 order (posted here). "This order independently determines that in addition to correspondence between the parties, the two internal training documents are eligible for production to plaintiff's counsel without implicating national security."

If the judge persists in his ruling, it would be highly unusual since most judges are loath to override the executive branch's conclusions that certain information needs to be classified on national security grounds. It has happened on a few occasions (see here, here, and here), but such decisions are very rare.

Three years ago, Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and supporters of libertarian causes, held a seminar of like-minded, wealthy political donors at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, Colo. They laid out a three-pronged, 10-year strategy to shift the country toward a smaller government with less regulation and taxes.

The first two pieces of the strategy - educating grass-roots activists and influencing politics - were not surprising, given the money they have given to policy institutes and political action groups. But the third one was: media.

Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company's eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. Koch Industries is among those interested, said several people with direct knowledge of the sale who spoke on the condition they not be named. Tribune emerged from bankruptcy on Dec. 31 and has hired JPMorgan Chase and Evercore Partners to sell its print properties.

The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion.

Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs' laissez-faire ideas. The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. A deal could include Hoy, the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, which speaks to the pivotal Hispanic demographic.

The United States is exploring how to save money on security by charging a toll to Canadians crossing the border by ground - a possible new traveller's tax that immediately raised fierce opposition from political and business leaders in both countries.

The idea of a "crossing fee" was revealed in a recent budget request by the Department of Homeland Security, which was seeking funds to study the cost of collecting a new toll for people walking and driving into the United States from the north and south.

Exercise Saturday will test the Postal Service and the region's response plans to a biohazard event.

The U.S. Postal Service plans to conduct an emergency preparedness exercise in Melville this week.

The exercise planned for Saturday will test the Postal Service and the region's response plans to a biohazard event.The Postal Service says the "full-scale" exercise will include employee evacuations from the Mid Island Mail Processing & Distribution Center.

The exercise is scheduled to begin Saturday, April 27 at 11 a.m. and last about three hours. Some disruption to traffic may be expected at this location.

Also participating in this activity will be the Melville Fire Department and other community mutual aid responders, Suffolk County Public Health Department, County Homeland Security and Anti-Terrorism, County Fire Rescue Emergency Services and other federal agencies.

Raleigh, NC - NCDOT Ferry Division is taking part in security exercise drills on Wednesday, involving its ferry terminals at Cherry Branch, Minnesott Beach, Pamlico River and Cedar Island. All vessels assigned to those routes will also be involved.

NCDOT would like to point out that the exercise is not taking place in response to any threat to the ferry vessels, terminals or any other transportation venue or facility, but rather as a learning exercise to assist in making North Carolina ferries safe for the traveling public.

Similar drills have been taking place within the Ferry Division over the last few years.

The Ferry Division and its staff will be partnering with the Transportation Security Administration's Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) team, Craven and Carteret County Sheriff departments and emergency services, and the United States Coast Guard Sector North Carolina.

This is an exercise in which local and federal agencies work together to supplement existing security resources, officials say.