[HogwartsExpress]

I hope 3 news per day won't be too much

TOO MUCH NO PROBLEM... the more the better.
However, you still only get paid for just one - JG

South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn and 20 win

An unusual sequence of numbers drawn in South Africa's national lottery has sparked accusations of fraud after 20 people won a share of the jackpot.

Tuesday's PowerBall lottery saw the numbers five, six, seven, eight and nine drawn, while the PowerBall itself was, you have guessed it, 10.

The organisers say the sequence is often picked. But some have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way.

It is extremely rare for multiple winners to share the jackpot.

The organisers said 20 people purchased a winning ticket and won 5.7m rand ($370,000; £278,000) each.

Another 79 ticketholders won 6,283 rand each for guessing the sequence from five up to nine but missing the PowerBall.

The chances of winning South Africa's PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200 - the number of different combinations when selecting five balls from a set of 50, plus an additional bonus ball from a pool of 20.

The odds of the draw resulting in the numbers seen in Tuesday's televised live event are the same as any other combination. Competitions resulting in multiple winners are rare, but this may have something to do with this particular sequence.

"Congratulations to tonight's 20 winners of the PowerBall draw," lottery operator Ithuba tweeted, adding: "These numbers may be unexpected, but we see many players opt to play these sequences."

On Wednesday, people took to social media to share their thoughts.

One Twitter user, Mr Tee, alleged a "scam". Another user, Lungaz, suggested there was "absolutely no way in hell that's a coincidence".

Others called for an inquiry into Tuesday's winning lottery result and the competition's regulator, South Africa's National Lotteries Commission (NLC), said it would investigate the draw, which it called unprecedented.

A spokesman for NLC, Ndivhuho Mafela, said the body would review the incident and report its findings.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55154525

[Fatima99]

TAKING THE MICKEY Mum horrified to find four live mice in her Amazon Prime Christmas delivery

LIVE mice escaped from an Amazon package into a family's home after a mum put the box under her Christmas tree.

Mum Vicki Acheson, who lives in Cardiff, has caught four of the creatures scampering about her house, but believes there could be at least one more on the loose.


Cardiff mum Vicki Acheson says at least five mice escaped into her home after arriving in an Amazon Prime box


Vicki managed to get several of the mice with the vacuum cleaner - before releasing them outside

The pests arrived inside a package sent as a gift to Vicki's son Alex, who is 13 months old.

Vicki said: "My mum and sister ordered my son's Christmas present on Prime.

"It was delivered on Monday, and as they'd said not to open it and keep it as a surprise, I put it under the tree."

But as she turned away, Vicki spotted a movement out of the corner of her eye.

"I saw something coming out of the box and running off," she said.

"I did a bit of looking about, but I assumed it was a spider."

However, when she returned to work, she suddenly spotted two mice scuttling through her living room.

"Normally I'm quite calm, but I totally freaked out," she said.


At least one mouse is still believed to be loose in the house

"It was so unexpected and I was just kicking myself for making the assumption that it had been a spider.

"By the end of the day, I'd seen four of them, and then another one the following morning."

Vicki quickly took the Amazon box outside - and discovered it had been chewed on the inside.

But despite calls to the company, she was unable to formally complain, as her sister had ordered the present.

"She'd done a lovely thing, and it looked like she'd end up with the responsibility of calling to complain, even though it was a gift for my son," Vicki said.

Amazon eventually contacted the family - and officials now say they'll refund the gifts and send new presents and a food hamper.

While waiting for the company to call, Vicki called for back-up.

She said: "My partner Gareth was at work, and he rang his brother and dad.

"They ended up sucking the mice up with the vacuum cleaner. We set them free afterwards.

[goldie0608]

First-of-Its-Kind Med School Makes History For Cherokee People



In rural Oklahoma, a brand new medical school sits in the Cherokee Nation, training Nation members to become physicians at Nation clinics.

Oklahoma State University College of Osteopathic Medicine at the Cherokee Nation (COMCN) is the first tribally associated medical school in the country, and they just had their inaugural class after opening this fall.

Bill John Baker, the former principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, is widely credited with spurring the project as far as it has come, which even included the decision to sell the Nation’s private jet to help begin the new investment in a Cherokee Nation medical system, which first drew the attention of Oklahoma State University (OSU) to the idea of opening a medical school on reservation land.

“After we were removed from tribal lands and there were no teachers, we invested our treasury into teachers,” said Bill John Baker, according to MedScape. “This is a natural progression. Just as our ancestors grew their own teachers 150 years ago, we want to grow our own doctors.”

Indeed less than half of 1% of physicians in the country are eligible for tribal citizenship, but before growing their own doctors, Bill John Baker refurbished rural Nation clinics and financed the largest tribally owned outpatient facility in the country; a stunning four-story, 469,000-square-foot piece of architecture at W.W. Hastings Hospital campus, offering optometry, audiology, physical rehabilitation, dental, behavioral health, radiology, lab, and pharmacy services.

“The Cherokee Nation is excited to open this beautiful new facility that allows us to serve more of our citizens, and offer more services than they ever had before,” Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in October at the grand opening.

“This facility is a real game changer that will improve our overall health system and is a huge investment in our local economy. It is a blessing for me to see former Chief Bill John Baker’s vision come to fruition because of what it means for our citizens.”

OSU and the tribes take notice

Bill John Baker was still the Principal Chief when OSU approached the Nation with the idea of opening a medical school.

“It was a match made in heaven,” Baker said. “We’ve been investing in our young people for quite some time, sending them to medical school at Harvard and Stanford and all over the country, but when we saw an opportunity to have a medical school right here and not have to ship our kids off, that made perfect sense.”

The Cherokee Nation general fund paid $40 million for the 84,000-square-foot facility, the construction of which, while being delayed to spring 2021 by the pandemic, is nearing completion. Like the outpatient facility, the building is striking to look at, and will marry modern medicine with traditional healing practices in both service and decor.

Interior art and decoration will be provided by Cherokee artisans, and the landscaping for the building will be exclusively medicinal plants used by Cherokee medicine men and women for generations such as yarrow, blue indigo, rattlesnake master, coneflower, and elderberry.

While the school sits on Cherokee land, the agreement to create it was supported by four other tribal nations: the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole. All five tribes are providing funds for scholarships and clinical rotation sites within their tribal clinic systems.

Being a state school, COMCN isn’t beholden to train Cherokee or Chickasaw physicians, however 22% of the inaugural school identify as Native American, whether Cherokee or otherwise.

In an effort to keep them connected with their communities and their heritage, COMCN is preparing residency programs in Nation clinics and volunteer programs to be able to work and study traditional healing medicine and its benefits.

“We’re hoping an unwritten curriculum will emerge from the healing practices of the Cherokee people,” said Natasha Bray, DO, the school’s associate dean for academic affairs.

The success of these new Cherokee medical facilities involves marrying the future with a rich cultural past, and could go a long way to improving the lives of rural Oklahomites, Cherokee, Choctaw, or Chickasaw alike.

[Fivetide]

NASA: Mystery object is 54-year-old rocket, not asteroid


This Sept. 20, 1966 photo provided by the San Diego Air and Space Museum shows an Atlas Centaur 7 rocket
on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. A mysterious object temporarily orbiting Earth is the Centaur upper
stage of this 54-year-old rocket, not an asteroid after all, astronomers confirmed Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020.
Observations by a telescope in Hawaii clinched its identity, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California. (Convair/General Dynamics Astronautics Atlas Negative Collection/San Diego Air and
Space Museum via AP)

A mysterious object temporarily orbiting Earth is a 54-year-old rocket, not an asteroid after all, astronomers confirmed Wednesday.

Observations by a telescope in Hawaii clinched its identity, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The object was classified as an asteroid after its discovery in September. But NASA’s top asteroid expert, Paul Chodas, quickly suspected it was the Centaur upper rocket stage from Surveyor 2, a failed 1966 moon-landing mission. Size estimates had put it in the range of the old Centaur, which was about 32 feet (10 meters) long and 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter.

Chodas was proven right after a team led by the University of Arizona’s Vishnu Reddy used an infrared telescope in Hawaii to observe not only the mystery object, but — just on Tuesday — a Centaur from 1971 still orbiting Earth. The data from the images matched.


In this Aug. 13, 1965 photo provided by the San Diego Air and Space Museum, technicians work on an Atlas
Centaur 7 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla. A mysterious object temporarily orbiting Earth is a Centaur 7 upper
stage rocket, not an asteroid after all, astronomers confirmed Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020. Observations by a
telescope in Hawaii clinched its identity, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
(Convair/General Dynamics Astronautics Atlas Negative Collection/San Diego Air and Space Museum via AP)

“Today’s news was super gratifying!,” Chodas said via email. “It was teamwork that wrapped up this puzzle.”

The object formally known as 2020 SO entered a wide, lopsided orbit around Earth last month and, on Tuesday, made its closest approach at just over 31,000 miles (50,476 kilometers). It will depart the neighborhood in March, shooting back into its own orbit around the sun. Its next return: 2036.

[hija]

Beavers finished work on a historic dam



They have been labouring for weeks. Now Exmoor’s beavers have finally completed their first construction project in more than 400 years: a dam on the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate in Somerset, where the tree-gnawing animals were reintroduced earlier this year.

“We’ve already spotted kingfishers at the site, and over time, as the beavers extend their network of dams and pools, we should see increased opportunities for other wildlife, including amphibians, insects, bats and birds,” said the National Trust’s Ben Eardley.

Wiped out by hunters in the 16th century, beavers are staging a comeback in the UK thanks to various rewilding projects, as previously reported on by Positive News magazine.

Image: Cheryl Reynolds/Creative Commons

[PennySerenade]

LFC Dog Guides to fund two dogs this year with Giving Tuesday campaign



TORONTO -- Getting around on a snowy December day is now easier for 15 year-old Maggie Ingleson, thanks to ‘Hopper.’

“He is amazing,” said Ingleson of her Canine Vision Dog Guide. “He’s so sweet, and whenever I’m having not such a good day, he’s always just there.”

‘Hopper’ teamed up with Ingleson in 2019. The Caledon East teen has an optic tumor and has been blind since the age of four. Before receiving Hopper as a guide, she used a cane to get around.



“It was a change, but I really do like it,” she tells CTV News Toronto. “It gave me that extra independence that I was looking for.”

It’s one of many success stories for the Lions Foundation of Canada (LFC) Dog Guides.

“Maggie and Hopper are just so unique,” said Maria Galindo, communications manager at the Lions Foundation of Canada Dog Guides. “She’s been through so much at such a young age, but in spite of that she keeps leading the way and has bonded with Hopper so well.”

The foundation continues to provide dog guides to Canadians, even during the pandemic.

“At a slower capacity, because of the restrictions due to COVID, but matches are still taking place,” Galindo said. “No matter the situation going on in the world, people need their dog guides, people need that safety and independence that these dog guides bring. So we will never stop.”



It’s been a challenging year for many charities, but LFC Dog Guides are hoping to benefit from the generosity around Giving Tuesday.

“They want to raise $50,000 and that will go toward two Canadians with a disability,” said Ingleson.

“Each dog guide costs $25,000 to train and place,” added Galindo. “The great thing about today is that donors actually get to name these two wonderful dogs. When you donate today, you get to enter a name into the dog guide contest that we have going on right now.”

Ingleson hopes Canadians will consider donating to the organization that connected her with her trusted companion and guide.

“They changed my life!” she tells CTV News Toronto. “It’s not always easy to navigate such a sighted world when you can’t see, so that change is everything to me.”

[Morgan2498]

Local nonprofit, animal rescue raises over $18K in 24-hour fundraising event


ASPCA foster kittens, Emmylou (left) and Cash Jr. (right)

BATON ROUGE - Cat Haven raised over $18,000 in just one day during its first-ever 225 Gives fundraising competition.

In an effort to raise funds for those in need in the Baton Rouge area, 225 Gives teamed up with over 200 nonprofits on Dec. 1, globally known as "Giving Tuesday."

Following Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, the movement focuses on giving back after a long weekend of splurging.

Cat Haven participated in the 24-hour competition with an original goal of $5,000. In just one day, $18,085 in donations came pouring in.

Money donated to the non-profit will go toward food and litter for the felines, spaying and neutering surgeries, medical expenses, and organizational costs, Cat Haven said in a statement Thursday.

Cat Haven's Operations Director Emma Meeker was overwhelmed by the amount of love and support they received throughout the event.

"I am astonished by the generosity of our community for our community cats! We are so grateful for the outpouring of support that we received! Thank you for donating to our organization," Meeker said.

Source: https://www.wbrz.com/news/local-nonprof ... sing-event

‘WTF?’: newly discovered ghostly circles in the sky can’t be explained by current theories, and astronomers are excited



In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she’d found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn’t fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labelled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna’s.

Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO’s revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the Universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly. Because of the enormous data volumes, I expected the discoveries would be made using machine learning. But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing.

Hunting ORCs
Our team searched the rest of the data by eye, and we found a few more of the mysterious round blobs. We dubbed them ORCs, which stands for “odd radio circles”. But the big question, of course, is: “what are they?”

At first we suspected an imaging artefact, perhaps generated by a software error. But we soon confirmed they are real, using other radio telescopes. We still have no idea how big or far away they are. They could be objects in our galaxy, perhaps a few light-years across, or they could be far away in the Universe and maybe millions of light years across.

When we look in images taken with optical telescopes at the position of ORCs, we see nothing. The rings of radio emission are probably caused by clouds of electrons, but why don’t we see anything in visible wavelengths of light? We don’t know, but finding a puzzle like this is the dream of every astronomer.

We know what they’re not
We have ruled out several possibilities for what ORCs might be.

Could they be supernova remnants, the clouds of debris left behind when a star in our galaxy explodes? No. They are far from most of the stars in the Milky Way and there are too many of them.

Could they be the rings of radio emission sometimes seen in galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation? Again, no. We don’t see any underlying galaxy that would be hosting the star formation.

Could they be the giant lobes of radio emission we see in radio galaxies, caused by jets of electrons squirting out from the environs of a supermassive black hole? Not likely, because the ORCs are very distinctly circular, unlike the tangled clouds we see in radio galaxies.

Could they be Einstein rings, in which radio waves from a distant galaxy are being bent into a circle by the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies? Still no. ORCs are too symmetrical, and we don’t see a cluster at their centre.

A genuine mystery
In our paper about ORCs, which is forthcoming in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, we run through all the possibilities and conclude these enigmatic blobs don’t look like anything we already know about.

So we need to explore things that might exist but haven’t yet been observed, such as a vast shockwave from some explosion in a distant galaxy. Such explosions may have something to do with fast radio bursts, or the neutron star and black hole collisions that generate gravitational waves.

Or perhaps they are something else entirely. Two Russian scientists have even suggested ORCs might be the “throats” of wormholes in spacetime.

From the handful we’ve found so far, we estimate there are about 1,000 ORCs in the sky. My colleague Bärbel Koribalski notes the search is now on, with telescopes around the world, to find more ORCs and understand their cause.

It’s a tricky job, because ORCS are very faint and difficult to find. Our team is brainstorming all these ideas and more, hoping for the eureka moment when one of us, or perhaps someone else, suddenly has the flash of inspiration that solves the puzzle.

It’s an exciting time for us. Most astronomical research is aimed at refining our knowledge of the Universe, or testing theories. Very rarely do we get the challenge of stumbling across a new type of object which nobody has seen before, and trying to figure out what it is.

Is it a completely new phenomenon, or something we already know about but viewed in a weird way? And if it really is completely new, how does that change our understanding of the Universe? Watch this space!

https://theconversation.com/wtf-newly-d ... ted-142812

[HogwartsExpress]

Myanmar monk offers temple sanctuary for threatened snakes

Tenderly stroking the back of a large Burmese python resting on his lap, Buddhist monk Wilatha is trying to play a part in saving scores of snakes that might otherwise be killed or destined for the black market.

The 69-year-old monk has created a refuge for snakes ranging from pythons to vipers and cobras at the Seikta Thukha TetOo monastery in the bustling commercial city of Yangon.

Since the snake refuge launch five years ago, residents and government agencies, including the fire department, have been bringing captured snakes to the monk.

“Once people catch snakes, they will likely try to find a buyer,” said Wilatha, who also uses his saffron robe to clean the snake, one of the many he looks after and describes as “my children”.

Having such a sanctuary in mainly-Buddhist Myanmar means people can gain ‘merit’ by giving the snakes to a monk rather than killing or selling them, said Wilatha, who feels he is helping protect the natural ecological cycle.

The Southeast Asian country has become a global hub in the illegal wildlife trade with snakes often smuggled to neighbouring countries like China and Thailand, according to conservationists.

Despite being considered an invasive species in some parts of the world, the Burmese python has been listed as “vulnerable” in its native Southeast Asia by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.




“Generally, living in close proximity to people induces stress in snakes,” said Kalyar Platt, a member of the Wildlife Conservation Society, explaining the need to get them back into the forest as soon as possible.

Relying on donations for the roughly $300 a month needed to feed the snakes, Wilatha only keeps them until he feels they are ready to go back to the wild.

During a recent release at the Hlawga National Park, he said he was happy to see them slither into freedom but worried in case they were caught again.

“They would be sold to the black market if they are caught by bad people.”

source: https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-myanm ... 7yRuLjFBH0

[HogwartsExpress]

Enigma encryption machine used by Nazi Germany in World War II found on bottom of Baltic Sea



German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War II which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine.

They thought they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, but underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find.

"I've made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years. But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines," Dr Huber said.

The Nazi military used the machines to send and receive secret messages during World War II but British cryptographers cracked the code, helping the Allies gain an advantage in the naval struggle to control the Atlantic.



At Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unravelling the code, shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives.

Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, the crews of about 50 submarines, or U-Boats, followed an order to scuttle their ships in Gelting Bay, near the Danish border, to avoid handing them to the Allies.

Destroying encryption devices was part of the order.

"We suspect our Enigma went overboard in the course of this event," said Dr Huber, of the company Submaris which leads underwater research missions.

Overall, Germans sank more than 200 of their submarines in the North and Baltic Seas at the end of the war.

The Enigma device, which looked like a typewriter, consisted of a keyboard and wheels which scrambled messages.

Although several hundred thousand machines were produced, only a few hundred are known to exist.

They sell at auction for tens of thousands of euros.

The find, made by divers working on behalf of WWF aiming to find abandoned fishing nets that endanger marine life, will be given to the archaeology museum in Schleswig.



source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-04/ ... 2/12950328

[johngriffen]

I sometimes get REALLY DEPRESSED reviewing the news these days.
It's always about a global pandemic threatening life as we know it,
protests around the world, stupid politicians, natural disasters,
or some other really bad story.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Welcome to The mobi weekly news magazine
IN OTHER NEWS
FRIDAY DECEMBER 4
What is it?
Here is your chance to become an "ACE REPORTER" for our weekly news magazine.
It is your job to fine weird, funny or "good feel" stories from around the world and share them with our readers in our weekly magazine

How do you play?
Just post a story that you have come across that made you smile, laugh, feel good...
BUT NOTHING DEPRESSING

EXAMPLE POST

​Naked sunbather chases wild boar through park after it steals his laptop bag

A naked sunbather was seen chasing wild boar through a park after it stole his laptop bag.
Amusing photographs from Germany show the man running after the animal to try and claim the plastic bag back.
But the cheeky boar and its two piglets appear to be too quick for the sunbather, who can't keep up with their speedy little trotters.
As the incident unfolds, groups of friends and family sat on the grass watch on and laugh.
Heads are seen turning in surprise and amusement in the hilarious photographs.
The incident happened at Teufelssee Lake - a bathing spot in the Grunwell Forest in Berlin, Germany.

Rules:
Each Edition of IN OTHER NEWS will be open for 7 days...
You may post One Story in any 24 hour period
So in other words, you can enter only once a day
Each news day will start when I post announcing it
OR at:
9:00 AM CHICAGO TIME (UTC -6)
3:00 PM GMT (UTC -0)
on those days I space out and forget to post or can't due to Real Life
Stories may be accompanied with images - but No big images, please! 800x800 pixels wide maximum
Videos are allowed, but please keep them to under a minute, and post a short summary for those that don't like to click on videos
No Duplicate stories - Where a post has been edited resulting in duplicates, then the last one in time gets disallowed.
And please limit this to reasonably family friendly stories

Reward:
Each news story posted that I feel is acceptable (must be a real story, too few words or simply a headline are not considered acceptable) will earn you 50 WRZ$
If you post multiple stories on any given day, you will only earn 50 WRZ$ for the first story of the Day
Special Bonus - Each week I will award "The Pulitzer Prize" for the best story of the week
The weekly winner of the "The Pulitzer Prize" will receive a 100 WRZ$ bonus
It's just my personal opinion, so my judgement is final

So help bring GOOD news to the members of mobi, and join our reporting team...

IN OTHER NEWS

[Morgan2498]

UK to become first country in Europe to ban live animal exports

Environment secretary hails ‘Brexit success’ for animal welfare, but poultry to be excluded and Northern Ireland exempted



Plans to ban the export of live animals for slaughter and fattening are to be unveiled by the UK’s environment secretary, George Eustice, on Thursday.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the plans were part of a renewed push to strengthen Britain’s position as a world leader on animal welfare.

An estimated 6,400 animals were sent to Europe for slaughter in 2018, according to Defra. Many of those left through the port of Ramsgate in Kent.

“Live animals commonly have to endure excessively long journeys during exports, causing distress and injury. Previously, EU rules prevented any changes to these journeys, but leaving the EU has enabled the UK government to pursue these plans,” Defra said.

The eventual ban would be considered a Brexit success, seeing Britain become the first country in Europe to end this practice.

The beginning of a joint eight-week consultation in England and Wales would mark “a major step forward in delivering on our manifesto commitment to end live exports for slaughter”, said Eustice. “Now that we have left the EU, we have an opportunity to end this unnecessary practice. We want to ensure that animals are spared stress prior to slaughter.”

It is understood from a UK government source that the joint consultation will be used as the basis for discussions with Scotland. Those discussions, and the consultation findings, will then be used to examine ways of harmonising the ban.

However, live exports look set to continue in Northern Ireland which “will continue to follow EU legislation on animal welfare in transport for as long as the Northern Ireland protocol is in place”, according to Defra.

Poultry exports also appear set to continue, Defra added: “The measure on live exports will not impact on poultry exports or exports for breeding purposes.” The UK exports tens of millions of chicks a year in an industry that was worth £139m in 2018.

Asked if the eventual ban might be an achievement that could be credited to the prime minister Boris Johnson’s partner, Carrie Symonds, the source would not comment. Symonds is a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation (CAWF) which has long lobbied for an end to live exports.

“We are hoping this consultation will lead to an end to live exports for slaughter and fattening, which has caused such enormous suffering, by 2022 or even next year,” said CAWF’s founder, Lorraine Platt. The foundation sent its latest research report on ending live exports to the UK government several weeks ago.

Compassion in World Farming’s chief policy adviser, Peter Stevenson, said the organisation was “delighted that Defra plans to ban live exports for slaughter and fattening. We have campaigned for over 50 years against the massive suffering caused by this inhumane, archaic trade, so this unambiguous proposal is very welcome.”

The RSPCA’s CEO, Chris Sherwood, was equally welcoming and said he looked “forward to seeing this happen as the RSPCA has campaigned on this issue for more than 50 years”.

In other parts of Europe, news of a planned British ban on live exports was welcomed by animal welfare groups. “This is great news, it is far too stressful to export live animals for slaughter,” said Iris Baumgaertner from Germany’s Animal Welfare Foundation, who added that the news followed a recent decision by the authorities in one of Germany’s largest cattle exporting regions not to approve the logs for 132 breeding heifers due to be exported to Morocco for slaughter, meaning the journey could not proceed. An appeal by the exporter was denied by the courts because, according to Baumgaertner, the judge said “whether it was today or in the future, the slaughter would still be inhumane.”

In September, the Dutch had already suggested the EU should begin to limit live animal exports. At an informal Agriculture and Fishery Council meeting, Dutch minister of agriculture, nature and food quality, Carola Schouten, asked the council to adjust animal welfare regulations and limit the transport of livestock for slaughter.

A special EU committee on animal transport has kept live export discussions in the spotlight this year. The European parliamentary committee on the protection of animals during transport began its hearings in October. MEPs critical of live exports have repeatedly asked the committee to consider bans on exports outside the EU, and suggested limiting transport times within the EU. The committee is due to sit again Wednesday afternoon.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... al-exports

[Fatima99]

'Best buddies': Grieving pit bull finds joy again with new kitten companion
Dude, a rescued pit bull, has formed an unlikely bond with a kitten named Ace.



A pit bull named Dude learned through personal experience that good things really do come in small packages.

Dude has lived up to his name since being rescued as a parvo puppy from a Caribbean island by Florida resident Julie Burroughs in 2015. The affable dog saw her through a divorce and was close with her older pit bull, Harley Jane.

But when Harley Jane died in February, Dude slipped into a funk.



“I felt really bad for Dude because he was really sad and very mopey,” Burroughs told TODAY. “I even tried pheromone collars. I just knew he needed a friend.”

Burroughs, 48, has had a particularly busy schedule this year, working as a finance and insurance manager for an RV dealership, which has seen increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic. So instead of getting another dog, she thought, “I’ll get Dude a kitten.”

This summer, she saw a photo of a tabby kitten rescued by a firefighter: Ace. She instantly knew he was "the one." But incorporating him into the family took a little finesse.

“The first couple weeks were a little interesting getting them used to each other,” she recalled with a laugh.

Dude seemed overly curious about Ace’s crate when she brought the kitty home, so Burroughs kept her dog on a leash for their initial interactions. Then one Saturday night, she decided they had smelled and seen each other enough to just go for it.

“They were fine, and now they are best buddies,” she said. “Ace is definitely in charge.”

[HogwartsExpress]

Glow-in-the-dark Australian animals take scientists by surprise



Following the accidental discovery by scientists in the United States that platypuses glow under UV light, further tests by Australian scientists show other mammals and marsupials also glow.

Biofluorescence has long been known to occur in some insects and sea creatures, but it was unknown that it occurred in other Australian mammals until earlier this month, when scientists at the Western Australian Museum rushed to check their specimen drawers to factcheck the US report.

The findings have Australian scientists working together to confirm the findings of biofluorescence in these animals, and to start looking for a reason that it may occur.

Paula Anich is a North America squirrel researcher from the Center for Science and the Environment, Northland College in the USA, and co-author of the paper about biofluorescent platypuses that was published in the journal Mammalia.

“It’s hard to resist a platypus,” Dr Anich said.

She was alerted to a pink glow that squirrels exude under UV light by a colleague.



Dr Anich then decided to check some of the other specimens she had to hand.

“We pulled the monotreme [egg-laying mammals like platypuses] drawer and the platypuses fluoresced, and it was amazing,” she told ABC Radio Hobart.

It was also reported by Linda Reinhold, a zoologist and amateur mycologist, in the Autumn/Winter 2020 edition of the Queensland Mycologist that a roadkill specimen of platypus in Queensland was seen to glow under UV light.

More glow in the dark surprises
Palaeontologist and curator of Mammalogy at the Western Australian Museum, Kenny Travouillon, heard about the article and borrowed a UV light from that the arachnology department of the museum.

“We borrowed it and turned off the lights in the collection and looked around for what was glowing and not glowing,” Dr Travouillon said.

“The first one we checked was the platypus obviously.

“We shone the light, and they were also glowing, it confirmed the research.”

Then they turned their light on other specimens in their collection.



“We tried on marsupial moles and wombats,” Dr Travouillon said.

“We did on the carnivorous marsupials and they did not glow at all.

“It probably makes sense, because if their prey can see UV light, they would not be able to hide from them.”

Why do they glow?
Sarah Munks is an adjunct senior researcher with the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Tasmania and an expert in platypuses.

Given that the sample size of three platypus that had been preserved in a drawer in the Northern Hemisphere for decades is not enough for scientists to confirm that glowing fur is endemic to platypuses, she was initially sceptical.

“You mean all these years we have been farting around with ordinary spotlights and we should have been using UV?” Dr Munks said.

“When I first read it, I thought ‘mmm, they were just sad-looking museum specimens’.

“A colleague suggested that they could be covered in urine.”

Benefits to glowing in the dark

Dr Anich hoped the release of the paper would get on the radar of Australian platypus experts.

“I think they are the scientists and wildlife biologists best placed to figure it out,” she said.

“It is possible that it is actually taking the ultraviolet light that is more prevalent at dusk and dawn, making it kind of disappear so that any predators that are keying in on ultraviolet light can’t see the platypus because it is kind of cloaking itself.”

Dr Munks was cautious.

“Their sample size was tiny – and I always like to put in a plug for more research,” she said.

“Is this just a way they can find each other? I don’t think so, platypuses have so many other ways of finding their way around.

“All the work done on other species suggests that it is an ancient form of camouflage.

“It could just be one of these ancestral traits, like humans have remnant tails.

Dr Travouillon suggests that “the benefit is probably so they can see their species from a distance, and they can approach them because they know that it is safe to go towards that animal.”

New collaborations and concern for funding
“It’s incredible seeing it zipping around the researchers,” said Dr Munks, referring to the journal article.

Dr Travouillon posted photos on Twitter of the other animals they tested under UV light, including an echidna, wombats, and bilbies.

“As soon as we posted the pictures, I got contacted from a researcher at Curtin University who works on forensic light and they are interested to do more research,” he said.

“He came with some of his equipment last week and we tested it on some of the specimens and it shows that it is not just UV light but some other lights too.

“We will look at various marsupials to see if there is a pattern with nocturnal mammals, a lot more research coming in the future,” Dr Travouillon said.

“If it’s quirky and interesting like that it will always get people’s attention.”

source: https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/2020/11/27/glow-in-the-dark-aus-animals/

[PennySerenade]

Toronto's oldest tree will no longer be cut down thanks to council decision


An oak tree estimated to be about 300 years old, or twice as old as modern Canada itself, is seen on July 12, 2020 in North York, Ont.

TORONTO -- A historic red oak tree that planted its roots years before Toronto grew into a bustling city will no longer face the axe thanks to a last-minute decision by city council to buy the property on which the tree grows.

The towering red oak, believed to be more than 250 years old, is one of the oldest trees in Canada. It was part of a delicate ecosystem along the Humber River before European colonization in the area.

The tree managed to survive colonization despite logging along the river and the clearance of the land for agriculture. It even survived the development of a suburban neighbourhood in the early 1960s.



However, the 24-metre oak tree, peacefully growing in the back yard of an old North York home, faced a real threat to its life this year after a new homeowner moved in and expressed concerns over its roots cracking the home’s foundation.

While some enchanted neighbours fought hard for the tree’s preservation, others worried that strong winds would topple the tree, and its trunk, with a circumference of over five metres, would cause serious damage.

When word got out that the tree’s life may be in danger, the city came up with a plan to purchase the property on 76 Coral Gable Drive and establish the space around the tree as a parkette, if it could raise at least half of the purchase price through donations.

The fundraiser never managed to raise the entire $430,000 goal, but on Thursday, the city council promised to purchase the property and pay the fundraising shortfall.

“Saving this is really a tribute to our sustainable, ecological routes that we got to protect and preserve,” Councillor Mike Colle said during a visit to the tree on Friday.



“It’s a wonderful gift of nature and thank God that we were able to preserve it and protect it for our children and great grandchildren. [It’s] beautiful to see this tree still standing here.”

The city said that due to its “size, age, beauty and cultural significance,” the “magnificent 250-year-old oak” would be the primary feature of the new little park.

The city said officials are working on the development plans for the parkette, which may be finalized over the next few months. People have until Dec. 12 to donate money toward the new parkette, the city said.