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Native Americans in Oklahoma join forces to help monarch butterflies
Seven Native American tribes in Oklahoma will provide habitat and food on their lands for monarch butterflies, whose numbers have plummeted in recent years due to troubles along their lengthy migration route.
Tribal leaders said at a news conference on Tuesday in Shawnee, southeast of Oklahoma City, they will plant crucial vegetation for the butterflies, including milkweed and native nectar-producing plants, on their lands.
"For the last several years, we have been raising bees and pollinators, so when his opportunity came along, it fit with what we were doing," Thalia Miller, director of the Chickasaw Nation Horticulture Department, told reporters.
The tribes will work with the University of Kansas’ Monarch Watch program and the Euchee Butterfly Farm in Bixby, Oklahoma. The project is supported by a grant of about $250,000 from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
mor
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-butterflies-monarchs-oklahoma-idUSKCN0Y12R1
Calgary pilot breaks rules to fly Fort McMurray animals to shelter
By: Jeremy Simes
Pilot Keith Mann didn’t think twice to break the rules and load his plane with more than 40 furry friends, after they spent a few days north of the fire-ravaged Fort McMurray.
More than 80,000 Fort McMurray residents were ordered to flee last Tuesday, leaving many without their pets as they were barred from re-entering the city due to the advancing wildfire.
Since then, owners and their fur babies have begun to reunite through ongoing animal rescue efforts after the flames subsided.
Mann, Suncor Energy’s manager of flight operations, said it just made sense to fly his load of critters down south after they sought refuge north of Fort McMurray.
“We’re all animal lovers here,” Mann said. “We knew it was important for owners to re-connect with them.”
more
http://www.metronews.ca/news/calgary/2016/05/09/calgary-pilot-flies-displaced-fort-mcmurray-animals-shelter.html
Tax havens have no justification, say top economists, calling for their abolition
More than 300 economists, including Thomas Piketty, are urging world leaders at a London summit this week to recognise that there is no economic benefit to tax havens, demanding that the veil of secrecy that surrounds them be lifted.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to host the summit nearly a year ago, but the event is in danger of simply turning a spotlight on how the British government has failed to persuade its overseas territories to stop harbouring secretly stored cash.
British officials are locked in negotiations with the crown dependencies and overseas territories, trying to persuade them to agree to a form of automatic exchange of information on beneficial ownership of companies. So far the overseas territories have only agreed to allow UK law enforcement agencies access to a privately held register of beneficial ownership, but the automatic exchange agreement would give a wider range of countries access to information on the ownership of shell companies.
Many overseas territories including the Cayman Islands are resisting the idea, and their attendance at the summit is in doubt.
more
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1942553/tax-havens-have-no-justification-say-top-economists-calling-their
Judge OKs U.S. extradition of Mexican drug boss 'El Chapo' Guzman
Source: Reuters
A Mexican judge has ruled that drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman can be extradited to face charges in the United States, the country's federal court authority said on Monday, days after he was moved to a prison on the U.S. border.
Early on Saturday, Guzman was moved to a high security prison in the northern city of Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border, and a senior Mexican security official said the kingpin's extradition was in motion and would happen by mid-year.
Guzman, boss of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, was for years the world's most wanted drug trafficker until his capture by Mexican Marines in February 2014. He then embarrassed the government by escaping from prison through a tunnel last July.
The government recaptured him in January and President Enrique Pena Nieto said soon afterwards that he had taken steps to ensure Guzman was extradited as soon as possible.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-guzman-idUSKCN0Y01SP
Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills
Matthew Campbell
Corinne Gretler
Nestlé is by far the largest food company in the world. Its 335,000 employees produce more than 2,000 brands, manufactured in 436 factories across 85 countries. It’s Europe’s most valuable corporation, worth $240 billion, comfortably more than oil giant Royal Dutch Shell. Among the world’s 195 nations, it sells in 189.
Nestlé’s impact on the history of how we eat is almost impossible to overstate. Sweets as we know them wouldn’t exist without Henri Nestlé, the company’s founder, who in the late 19th century supplied condensed milk for the world’s first milk chocolate, made by a neighbor in Vevey, Switzerland. Nestlé scientists created the first instant coffee, Nescafé, just in time for World War II rations. Nestlé chocolate was in the first chocolate chip cookie.
The Nestlé food and drink empire, including San Pellegrino water and Stouffer’s frozen dinners, is built on a foundation of sugar. Butterfinger, Cookie Crisp, KitKat, and Oh Henry! are all Nestlé products. So are Drumstick sundae cones, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, and Nesquik chocolate milk. In 1988, Nestlé even bought the life-imitates-art candy brand that makes Laffy Taffy and Nerds: Willy Wonka.
The company’s headquarters, on Vevey’s Avenue Nestlé, is far from a psychedelic sugarscape out of Roald Dahl. The building, the biggest in town, is a high-modernist pile of aluminum and green-tinted glass that resembles an upscale hospital or a midsize intelligence agency. Up a spiral staircase of gleaming metal, offices have fairy-tale views of sparkling Lake Geneva and the mist-shrouded Alps beyond. The perspective testifies that for a century and a half, sugar has been sweet. It isn’t anymore. Sugar is joining tobacco and alcohol in the club of products in which governments have taken an interest. In March the U.K. followed Mexico in imposing a tax on sugary drinks in an effort to cut obesity. Saudi Arabia may follow. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is weighing far tougher rules for sugar labeling, and the latest edition of U.S. dietary recommendations contained the strictest guidance on sugar yet.
much more
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-05/nestl-s-sugar-empire-is-on-a-health-kick
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