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Trees can decline for a number of reasons: insects, disease, soil compaction, winter injury, drought stress, and many other factors.

RAT LAND—A rat colony underneath Washington, D.C. recently became aware of a surface world with blue skies, warm sunlight, and abundant garbage. The colony, ruled by a council of noble volunteers, was planning a great move to the "land of plenty" until it was discovered to be infested with hundreds of politicians. "Ewww! No wonder our ancestors made their home in the bowels of the earth," said Whisker Nosewrangle in ancient Sumerian, the language all rats speak. "Disgusting!" "Rats, it is hereby forbidden to breach the surface," said a representative of the rat council. "The way is shut! We cannot...

More years ago than I care to remember, I was a college intern working on Capitol Hill. As part of our experience, various members of Congress came to speak to us. One of them as I recall was Strom Thurmond, at that time the Democratic senator from South Carolina, and a strong segregationist. He was pushing his plan to propagandize the military in something he called “Americanism.” Most of the interns in my class were well-socialized kids from northeast colleges like Yale and Mount Holyoke and such and they listened politely without objection. I wasn’t. I said I could understand...

Since early 2021 much of regional Australia is experiencing a mouse plague. The rodents have kept multiplying through the summer, and are expected to continue to do so even through the winter, potentially threatening crops. Now look at the result! It’s apocalyptic: Hundreds of thousands of mice are ransacking sheds and houses, getting onto and into everything across NSW, Qld, SA and Victoria, Australia. The rodents are munching through crops and wiring, and to the horror of home owners they’ve even been found in bags of bread. The whole district smells of mice. Why this mouse plague? Rainfall and good...

Last year, President Trump called Baltimore a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess". Speaker Pelosi responded by calling Trump’s comments “racist attacks”. Vox claimed that Trump was using “racist tropes” and US News conducted a fact check accusing him of racism. Now the rat race numbers are in. Orkin, the past control company, ratted out the "rattiest cities" and Baltimore has broken through into the top 10 for the first time. Like a rat clambering after a piece of moldy cheese, Charm City leaped up four places to be America’s 8th rattiest city. Baltimore has never been able to deny...

From the year that brought us murder hornets, famine-inducing locusts and the global coronavirus pandemic, comes the latest airborne scourge: a 50-mile-wide swarm of flying, and mating, ants. The horny swarm currently copulating over England is so vast, it showed up on radar to the bafflement of meteorologists, the Telegraph reported Friday. Weather watchers initially believed the weird “droplets” on their radar screens were rain clouds. But that made no sense given the dry and otherwise cloudless weather being enjoyed below in London, Kent and Sussex, the report said. Britain’s Met office later cleared the mystery up in a tweet....

The New York Times sent out an alert Monday warning that bedbugs were spotted in its newsroom — triggering hilarity on social media. According to an internal memo obtained by The Post, the NY Times said it “discovered evidence of bedbugs in a wellness room on the second floor, a couch on the third floor and a booth on the fourth floor.” “In an abundance of caution, the second floor room has been temporarily closed, the booth has been blocked off and the couch has been removed to be treated and professionally cleaned,” the memo said. Exterminators also swept the...

A recent thread on bedbugs abruptly disappeared because it wasn't news. Still, the care and feeding of tenants is a topic of some interest, and at least one person in that thread complained about tenants who muck up your property with bedbug infestations and then demand that you fix the problem at your expense.I've had to deal with this problem myself, and it might be worth sharing the results of my extensive research into ways to avoid the costly expedient of either whole-residence heat treatment or sulfuryl fluoride fumigation. This is only a list of a few products that appear...

Great video on Northern Ireland that helps people understand Baltimore....er, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, South Dallas, East Houston, uh....and Ilhan Omar's district in Minnesota.

Baltimore drivers are just the worst. Again. For the second straight year, Allstate ranked Baltimore drivers last out of those in the country’s 200 largest cities, adjusting for population density and precipitation. The city dropped into the bottom slot last year in the annual Best Driver’s Report — based on the average number of claims per driver and the company’s Drivewise app, which monitors driver behavior — after being ranked second-worst in 2017...

WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out at a leading African-American congressman on Saturday, calling him “a brutal bully” who represents a Baltimore-based district that has become a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Mr. Trump’s attack on Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland and leading critic of the president, parroted a segment that aired earlier in the morning on “Fox & Friends.” The president suggested that the congressman was a hypocrite for criticizing conditions in migrant detention centers at the southwestern border when his own district is blighted. Mr. Trump...

An 18-year-old who complained of seizures in the emergency room of an Indian hospital turned out to have parasites in his brain, according to a case study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Drs. Nishanth Dev and S. Zafar Abbas of the ESIC Medical College and Hospital in Faridabad reported that the patient, who appeared in the ER with swelling over his right eye, was having tonic-clonic seizures. Formerly known as "grand mal" seizures, these neural disturbances cause stiffened muscles and a loss of consciousness. To learn more about his condition, the medical staff performed an MRI...

Portions of major cities in Western U.S. states including California, Oregon, and Washington are increasingly becoming uninhabitable as rats, homeless people, and drug users have turned block after block into filthy, disease-ridden enclaves. “Once upon a time, our beautiful western cities were the envy of the rest of the world, but now they serve as shining examples of America’s accelerating decline,” writes Michael Snyder at his End of the American Dream blog. “The worst parts of our major western cities literally look like post-apocalyptic wastelands, and the hordes of zombified homeless people that live in those areas are too drugged-out...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Furious tenants of a public housing project in the Bronx were pleading for help Monday, saying their buildings are overrun with rats — and they’re not kidding. They have the video to prove it. But we should warn you, the pictures are not for the squeamish. “I’m traumatized,” tenant Veronica Martinez told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer. You’d be traumatized, too, if you had the same kitchen as Martinez. Rats. An entire family of rats, some as big as cats, have taken over, hopping in the sink, into pots and pans. It’s absolutely gut wrenching. “I should never...

When New Yorkers see something scurrying, they say something and that has brought rat complaints to the city's 311 hotline to a recent high of more than 24,000 so far this year, officials said on Thursday. 'The rats are taking over,' New York City comptroller Scott Stringer told Reuters. 'I'm a lifelong New Yorker and I've never seen it this bad... I see them on my way home, they're standing upright, they say, "Good morning, Mr Comptroller."' With more than two months of grumbling still left in 2015, rodent-related grievances were already at 24,375 as of Wednesday, said Mayor Bill...

The Architect of the Capitol took emergency measures Wednesday to handle a bed bug problem in a Senate Office Building, including closing off a restroom for a couple of days with yellow police tape. So watch out Senate aides and tourists approaching the sixth floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Bedbugs are not easy to shake. The trouble began prior to a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing held Wednesday in which some attendees—lobbyists, presumably—employed people to wait in line for them. This is a common practice and sources tell us it falls under the jurisdiction of the Rules Committee...

Catholic Charities wants to care for about 50 children from Central America at a campus in Baltimore County, seeking a role in the immigration crisis even though the consideration of other sites in Maryland has met with fierce local opposition.The organization plans to apply to federal officials to house the children at St. Vincent's Villa, a residential facility on Dulaney Valley Road, Catholic Charities head William J. McCarthy Jr. confirmed Thursday night.McCarthy said housing the children would amount to his organization doing its job. "Our role and our mission is to meet the needs of these children," he said. "This...

Islam is 2nd Largest Religion in Twenty US States June 6, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield 72 Comments Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century. Colonization can really sneak up on you. For now Islam is still a distant second to Christianity, but when you’re importing large numbers of immigrants whose main form of income is producing welfare cases, it won’t stay that way for long. Just look at Europe. Islam here is characterized...

Man started fire to burn bugs in 'deplorable' apartment, report states A man pulled from a fire on Sunday night told authorities that he started the blaze accidentally — while trying to burn the bugs in his apartment, the Orlando Police Department said. Orlando police and fire crews were called to the fire at an apartment building on Lakeview Street, near Lake Concord just north of downtown Orlando, about 11:30 p.m. The man was rescued from his burning apartment and taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center to be treated for smoke inhalation, according to Orlando police. An officer who checked...

.........Hotels contacted by The Washington Times about bedbug reports either referred calls to their corporate headquarters or didn’t return messages. Charlotte has a long way to go before its bedbug levels approach cities such as New York, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., where recent infestations have made national news, but a study this year by pest control company Orkin shows activity there has been on the rise. The survey, released in March, rated Charlotte as having the 33rd-most bedbug reports of any city in 2011. The list was topped by Cincinnati, Chicago and Detroit. By contrast, the GOP’s choice for its...