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OVERSEEING GRAZING SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - A U.S. government agency is considering using unmanned surveillance planes, or drones, to help oversee remote areas of eastern Idaho, raising concerns in a region deeply wary of outside interference. Officials the Bureau of Land Management office responsible for most of eastern Idaho may initially buy one hand-launched drone for an estimated $15,000 to help keep track of the vast, thinly populated area. They said the unpiloted aircraft, with a wingspan of about 4 feet, would monitor vegetation and streams in areas used largely for grazing and recreation and there were no immediate plans...

An Arizona appeals court on Wednesday upheld a jury’s $600,000 judgment in favor of a rancher in a defamation lawsuit, rejecting an environmental group’s argument that documents it posted on the Internet were shielded by the First Amendment. The Court of Appeals upheld a Pima County Superior Court jury’s award of compensatory and punitive damages to Jim Chilton in his lawsuit against the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit with offices in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, D.C. A lawyer for the rancher said the appellate court had stood up for a person wrongly defamed, while an attorney...

Two environmental groups say they will sue to stop construction of the intercounty connector, arguing that building the highway would violate sections of the federal Clean Air Act. Environmental Defense and the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club said the Washington region already fails to meet certain clean-air standards and that building the six-lane, 18-mile highway would increase pollution. The $2.4 billion intercounty connector would link Interstate 270 in Montgomery County with Interstate 95 in Prince George's County. "There are elementary schools and nursing centers close to the ICC, and people who live and work within several hundred yards of...

SALINA, Kan. -- There's been a lot of talk about the promise of biofuels -- liquid fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, made from plants -- to reduce our dependence on oil. Even President Bush beat the biofuel drum in his State of the Union speech. Fuel from plants? Sounds pretty good. But before you rush out to buy an E-85 pickup, consider: The U.S. annually consumes more fossil and nuclear energy than all the energy produced in a year by the country's plant life, including forests and plants used for food and fiber, according to the U.S. Department of...

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, has angered Australian Muslims with his description of their holy book as an incitement to violence. In a speech delivered to a group of Catholic business leaders at the Legatus summit in the United States, the Archbishop also took aim at what he claimed were hysterical and extreme claims about global warming. Dr Pell's central argument is that an understanding of Islam is vital for the future of western democracies. September 11, according to the Cardinal, was a wake-up call that prompted him to dust off a copy of the Koran. "I...

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how...

There may be a new reason for Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to exercise his second veto of the year - this one on the newly passed Legacy Parkway backlash bill. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raised its "potential concern" Friday about HB100. In a letter to the governor, the EPA Denver regional director suggested Utah may not be able to properly do its job carrying out federal environmental laws that have been delegated to the state, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and Superfund cleanups. "[T]his pending legislation raises concerns about whether important parts of the...

In our urgency to deal with really urgent stuff over the past few weeks, we have been piling up news articles regarding what some regard as a universal urgency. That would be global warming or Global Warming or GLOBAL WARMING, depending on one's perspective, provided that one has a perspective. Bill Clinton, speaking last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that mother of all junkets for rich folks who take themselves very seriously, said that GLOBAL WARMING bothered him a bunch. "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of...

Day after day in New York City, a small and strange procession can be seen moving along the pavement. While taxicabs whiz by and passersby move out of the way on Big Apple sidewalks, a handful of acolytes transport a large, hand painted box crafted from the wood of a sycamore tree. Make that "a sustainably harvested in Germany" sycamore tree. Dressed not in long flowing robes, but in average business apparel, the acolytes are garden-variety United Nations employees. There’s no need to hire Brink’s for protection and nothing but propaganda and hype worth robbing. The precious cargo of the...

Did you know that the National Audubon Society has earned more than $25 million in royalties by allowing oil and natural gas production in Louisiana's Rainey Wildlife Refuge and Michigan's Baker Sanctuary? In fact, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey commissioned by U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., in 2001 reported that 77 of 567 wildlife refuges in 22 states had oil and gas activities on their land in 2000, according to Arctic Power, the Alaskan group pushing for ANWR oil exploration. Ironically, the Rainey refuge is the winter habitat for snow geese migrating from Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...

Greenhouse gasbags gather in Montreal Posted: December 3, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Henry Lamb © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com Once again, the global warming industry is holding its annual party, this time in Montreal. Nearly 10,000 celebrants have gathered to eat, drink and be merry – and to bash the U.S. for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. Less than half the crowd are official delegates from 180 nations; the rest are advocates representing hundreds of non-government organizations. The stated purpose of the meeting is to construct the regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in phase two of the Kyoto Protocol –...

I know that this may be a long read, there's a lot of content here, but I think that many FReepers will find the information here interesting and disturbing. I will appreciate any help I can get with this situation. My wife and I have been homeschooling our children since they started schooling. We have 5th, 6th, and 8th graders. Recently, we made the tough decision to enroll them in a local Charter School. In Arizona, a Charter School is a privately run, smaller, more focused public school. It provides parents with school choice and some competition between the schools....

Albert Pujols, the Lou Gehrig of our times, picked up his first Most Valuable Player Award the other day. But if baseball had begun testing for drugs when other sports did, it might well have been Pujols' third MVP -- in just five major league seasons. And then we'd be saying, rightly, "This guy might be the best player to come along in 50 years." Pujols had the misfortune of breaking in around the time Barry Bonds developed a taste for "flaxseed oil." Thus, he finished second to Bonds in the '02 and '03 National League voting instead of, perhaps,...

WASHINGTON – British Petroleum could cut production at its Cherry Point refinery near Bellingham by 10 percent if a 28-year-old federal law restricting tanker traffic in Puget Sound isn’t repealed, the company’s top executive threatened Wednesday. BP America’s chief executive, Ross Pillari, made the comment less than a day after Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) quietly introduced legislation that would strike the provision in the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Washington’s lawmakers have said additional tanker traffic could increase the threat of oil spills in Puget Sound, and they have warned that without the restriction the state could become the center of...

Story can't be posted here due to copyright complaint, but it's interesting reading, so click this link to go directly to it. And by the way, 'unexpected' downside? Who couldn't predict that a rapidly-spinning blade in the sky would put the smackdown on birds?

If You Think Life Without Cars Is Easy, Remember the Big Easy News Release by Jody Clarke September 22, 2005 Washington, DC, September 22, 2005 -- Organizers of today's 'World Car-Free Day' are promoting supposedly more sustainable transportation systems. But according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, lack of access to cars can be deadly -- as demonstrated by the experience of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, where cars, rather than mass transit, were the key to evacuating hundreds of thousands of people. "It was a lack of access to cars that led tens of thousands of people to remain in...

A lizard known for its dinosaur-like features is back in line for endangered species protection, according to backers of the tiny, desert reptile. A federal judge in Arizona on Tuesday ruled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service erred when it dropped the Flat-tail Horned Lizard from consideration as a "threatened" species eligible for special legal protection. In a 15-page ruling, District Court Judge Neil Wake said the government "violated the Endangered Species Act" by failing to evaluate the impact of habitat loss on the species when it withdrew a proposal to list it as threatened. The ruling, according to environmentalists...

ARIVACA, Ariz. -- Jim Chilton is one of hundreds of ranchers targeted by environmental groups for allegedly allowing cattle to despoil the West's backcountry. Now Mr. Chilton is showing ranchers how to turn the tables on the green groups by using their own playbook. The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson is known for its lawsuits against ranching practices -- and for its methods of posting photos on the Internet that it says depict land destruction. So when the Center came after Mr. Chilton, he struck back with a defamation suit in Arizona Superior Court in Tucson last year....

Critical Areas Ordinance foes register name, taking it from less vocal property rights group Just who is the ``real'' Rural Majority?Ron Ewart of Fall City and Preston Drew of Carnation think it's rural folks like them. Foes of government, they oppose any regulation they figure tramples on their property rights. On their side are roughly 18,000 residents who signed petitions to do away with the county's controversial Critical Areas Ordinance and two other pieces of environmental regulation.What they didn't have was a catchy name that, as a bonus, carried great symbolic weight.They've got one now -- at the expense of...

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for shooting whales. Get a bunch of tourists, put them on boat, send it out to the North Pacific and let them fire off some rounds for an hour or two. Of course the ammunition used would be Kodak and Fuji stock, but it's a lot more humane than blowing them up. And it doesn't make the water go all red. With the exception of some Japanese and Scandinavian fisherman, a few Japanese scientists and the Japanese government, in the minds of most people -- whale hunting ranks up there with clubbing baby seals...