Forensic DNA blow to commercial whaling proposals
Proposals to resume commercial whaling have been dealt a blow by DNA detective work showing that restaurants in the US and South Korea illegally sold whale meat from Japan.
In June, Japan, Iceland and Norway are expected to ask the International Whaling Commission (IWC) for permission to resume commercial whaling. They say they can prevent smuggling by matching the DNA of whale meat sold in markets to a register of all legally caught whales. But all have refused to make their DNA registers public.
To find out the origin of whale meat being sold outside Japan, Scott Baker of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues secretly took samples from two restaurants, one in Santa Monica, California, and another in Seoul, South Korea.
They compared the DNA with that from samples bought in Japan, and found that they came from the same animals – proving that meat from whales hunted in Japan's scientific programme have been illegally sold abroad. The findings resulted in police raids on the restaurants last month.
Baker says the monitoring system can only work if Japan, Iceland and Norway make their DNA registers publicly available, and hand them over to an independent body like the IWC so routine checks can be carried out.
Jesus christ, who gives a fuck about whales. I'm sick of this shit.
wow, douche
no seriously, who cares. let japan kill them. we're destroying the planet every day, oceans are polluted, this civilization is fucked.
your sophistry is truly staggering
I doubt all of what you said is valid.
I've heard of Liberals who hate that we're still fighting a war in the oily East but little of Conservatives who do more than angst the fact. Instead, they're rather angry the White House is trying to force/delude with an arbitrary pull-out date that they keep moving around. Additionally, criticism of President Obama has been about his non-military international efforts and his domestic program, not his "overseas contingency" conduct; has Limbaugh called him a war criminal yet (has he? I don't listen to the guy but I know if there's something radical to say he'd be the one to willingly say it whether or not other people believed it)?
As for the effort to now expand oil drilling, this is nothing new. There has been some desire to push for expanding energy such as domestic oil drilling and nuclear construction for a number of years now, often little reported. In fact, a lot of territory off the coast of California is already well-documented and mapped and Shell or ExxonMobil could get working on an unobtrusive method of oil extraction within a month were they allowed to tomorrow. Those who push for the expansions now probably are using the war to try and tug heart strings - after-all, who wouldn't want to make it less likely we'd stay entangled there for the wrong reasons? - but is more a reaction to what is seen as an unrealistic Green national energy plan.
http://www.digitalnasties.com/shop/theres-always-wednesday-p-12.html
Why?
One word: Immigration.
Since 1970, America's largest source of immigrants has been Latin America, especially Mexico. More than half of these Latino immigrants lack a high school diploma.
Compare the U.S. experience with Canada's. More than half of all immigrants to Canada possess a university degree. Half of all Canada's Ph.D.s are foreign-born.
Why does America choose poorly educated immigrants? The short answer: America does not choose them. They choose themselves.
In the last decade, half of all the immigrants to the United States arrived illegally. Even many of the legal arrivals gained entry courtesy of relatives who originally slipped into the country against the law, then somehow regularized themselves.
By contrast, Canada (a country of 1/10 the U.S. population that takes proportionately many more immigrants than the United States) allows almost no illegal immigration.
The result: While immigration has enhanced the average skill level of the Canadian population, it has detracted from the average skill level of the U.S. population.
Many Americans carry in their minds a family memory of upward mobility, from great-grandpa stepping off the boat at Ellis Island to a present generation of professionals and technology workers. This story no longer holds true for the largest single U.S. immigrant group, Mexican-Americans.
Stephen Trejo and Jeffrey Groger studied the intergenerational progress of Mexican-American immigrants in their scholarly work, "Falling Behind or Moving Up?"
They discovered that third-generation Mexican-Americans were no more likely to finish high school than second-generation Mexican-Americans. Fourth-generation Mexican-Americans did no better than third.