The spill in the northeastern part of the state, which occurred along a different stretch than the controversial XL pipeline addition, coated an estimated half-acre of wetland, officials said.
Johnson ‘knew about Vote Leave’s illegal overspend’, says MP

Prime minister accused of ‘sitting on information’ after EU referendum
Boris Johnson knew of Vote Leave’s overspend during the 2016 EU referendum, but appears to have failed to tell the authorities, according to explosive new claims from a senior MP. The payment was subsequently ruled to be illegal.
Ian Lucas revealed that he has seen correspondence obtained during the parliamentary inquiry into disinformation and democracy which showed that Johnson’s most senior aide, Dominic Cummings, told the Electoral Commission that the prime minister, and his cabinet colleague Michael Gove, knew of the overspend by the pro-Brexit organisation.
If the government tracks women’s periods, why not track male ejaculation, too? | Arwa Mahdawi

Missouri is so concerned about women’s health it keeps spreadsheets of dates of Planned Parenthood patients’ periods
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Neo-Nazis threaten German Green Cem Özdemir with ‘execution’

Police are investigating a death threat to Cem Özdemir, the former co-leader of Germany’s Green party. A US neo-Nazi group was linked to the email, which featured the politician among a list of its assassination targets.
Inoreader – Israeli army arrests Palestinian feminist lawmaker, months after her release
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Source: Inoreader – Israeli army arrests Palestinian feminist lawmaker, months after her release
White House Freezes Military Aid to Lebanon, Against Wishes of Congress, State Dept. and Pentagon
Wants them to investigate why he is so unpopular – lol – i exchange for aid The indefinite hold halts a $105 million package that the State Department and Congress had approved. Analysts say the winners could be Iran, Russia, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
Report gives fast food chains low grades on antibiotics in beef
A Yale Student’s Urgent Fight to Save His Mother from Deportation

Rachel Nolan interviews Christian Padilla Romero, a Ph.D. student at Yale who has been fielding calls, running campaigns, and managing petitions on behalf of his mother, who is recovering from cancer and is at an ICE detention center in Atlanta.
In a first, a drone helps nab illegal logger in Peru

<br /><p>Jimmy Pinedo of Conservation International Peru, pictured above, operating a drone. (© Widber Flores Villacorta)</p><p>On Nov. 17 of last year, a man was caught illegally cutting down trees in Peru’s Alto Mayo Protected Forest.</p><p>Sadly, this was not out of the ordinary: Despite the area’s protected status, illegal farming and logging still occur in this swath of forest in the Amazon River basin, and people are routinely caught and fined.</p><p>What was out of the ordinary about this case: The culprit was caught by a drone.</p><p>That same week in November, Jimmy Pinedo of Conservation International Peru had been training a group of park rangers from Peru’s national protected-area agency (known by its acronym in Spanish, SERNANP) to use drones as a forest monitoring tool.
The eyes in the sky aim to provide a new weapon in the fight to stop illegal logging in the Alto Mayo Protected Forest, a swath of dense rainforest twice the size of New York City.</p><p>Before the training, community members living in the Alto Mayo reported a suspiciously large amount of timber being collected on a property within the protected forest. A SERNANP ranger attempted to investigate the property, but it was located on the
opposite bank of the wide and aggressive Mayo River — an impossible trip to make in the limited time he had.</p><p>Instead, he attended the drone workshop — with the property’s coordinates in hand.</p><p>Drones are an <a href=”https://ift.tt/338dPlh” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>increasingly popular tool</a> for conservationists. The drones can capture detailed
high-resolution images of objects on the ground, as well as human activities that threaten nature, such as illegal logging, mining and poaching. These images spare rangers from long-distance hikes or travel to potentially dangerous areas.</p><p>The drones’ popularity is growing as the technology improves, says Max Wright, remote sensing and spatial modeling analyst at Conservation International. “It’s staggering how quickly drone technology is advancing,” he said. “The
drones that we are using today have much greater range and data-collection capabilities than even what was available a few years ago.”</p><p>This range proved useful in the case of the illegal logger in Peru.</p><p><b>Flying to the scene</b></p><p>At the drone workshop in Alto Mayo, park ranger Onmer Cenepo surveyed the property from a launch site about 2 kilometers (roughly 1.2 miles) upstream, using a <a href=”https://ift.tt/2kez5mB” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Phantom 4 DJI quadcopter</a>,
a camera-equipped drone capable of high speeds and long flights.</p><p>Hovering 100 meters (328 feet) above the ground, the drone showed the rangers a large quantity of wood piled up on the other side of the Mayo River. Armed with this evidence, Frank Ramirez, the Alto Mayo indigenous community’s chief and coordinator
of the Control and Monitoring department in the Alto Mayo Protected Forest, called authorities to take action.</p><p><img style=”display:block;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;” src=”https://ift.tt/337SGrF” sf-size=”100″ /><i>Aerial photo of the illegal logging, pictured above, captured by a drone. (© Conservation International Peru)</i></p><p>It turns out the offender had a permit to harvest roughly 57 cubic meters (2,000 cubic feet) of land, about the size of two school buses. Instead, he was harvesting an area three times that size — which was illegal. According to Ramirez, the logger
received a written citation and will be fined for the illegal timber extraction by the regional environmental authority.</p><p>The hope is that this incident, and others like it, will discourage other farmers from illegal logging and developing protected land. Conservation International and partners are ramping up efforts to train rangers to patrol and monitor using drones. There
is a clear need: Though deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017 was <a href=”https://ift.tt/2NwC8mr” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>down 13 percent</a> from 2016, and Peru
declared a <a href=”https://ift.tt/2nccciL” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>new national park</a> in early 2018, incidents like the one in November elicit
concern from conservationists for the future of Peru’s forests — and hope that drones can improve protection and enforcement.</p><p>“In the future, I could see small teams of rangers going out into the protected area to systematically map the forests at fine resolution or using drone imagery to verify deforestation events in remote — or even dangerous — areas,”
Wright said.</p><p>In the past two years, Conservation International has trained 10 SERNANP rangers and three partners from ECOAN (Asociación de Ecosistemas Andinos), a Peruvian organization that aims to reduce deforestation. The local indigenous community has also
been trained to operate drones. Conservation International is also piloting acoustic sensors that capture the sound of chainsaws and sends the coordinates to the ranger’s office, which can then send a drone to investigate.</p><p>As drones continue to get smaller and more powerful, they will play an increasingly important role — and offer hope for protecting Peru’s forests.</p><p><i>Cassandra Kane is the communications manager for Conservation International’s Conservation Finance Division.</i></p><p><i>Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates <a target=”_blank” rel=”noopener” href=”https://www.conservation.org/act”>here</a>. Donate to Conservation International <a href=”https://ift.tt/2WJfnA5″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>here.</a></i></p><hr /><p><b>Further reading</b></p><ul><li><a href=”https://ift.tt/2nccciL” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Peru establishes new national park in the Amazon<br /></a></li><li><a href=”https://ift.tt/338dPlh” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Conservation tools: How drones can save rainforests<br /></a></li><li><a href=”https://ift.tt/2JHLHhk” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Low-flying, crime-sniffing drones: Coming soon to the Amazon?</a></li></ul><hr />
Spain: Court acquits men of gang-raping unconscious teen
The judges said they couldn’t convict the men of sexual assault — Spain’s equivalent of rape — because the victim was in an “unconscious state.” Women’s rights groups have urged authorities to change the law immediately.
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