A rare photograph taken earlier this month of a Florida panther and her two kittens is making the e-mail rounds among wildlife biologists and conservation partners who have toiled for decades to restore the big cat’s habitat. The photo, taken from an airplane above Picayune Strand near Naples, captures the trailing kitten mid-leap, as if euphorically kicking up her heels in delight.
For those who have witnessed the shrinking of the panther’s historic range – now down to five percent of its original size – the snapshot is as sweet as January’s high-profile visit from Washington VIPs for a groundbreaking ceremony at the Strand. It’s proof positive that restoring this part of the Everglades is good for Florida’s iconic animal.
After three decades of working to protect Florida’s natural resources, including panther conservation, Service wildlife biologist Kim Dryden said, “It’s truly exciting to take this step towards panther recovery.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally funded by and published at Truthout.org, but for unknown reasons, it does not appear to be in the searchable archives anymore. When this was discovered on Monday, October 24, 2011, we re-published it here.
by Glynn Wilson
Northeast Jefferson County east of Birmingham, Alabama, has long been known as a white flight suburb and home to a crowd of racist rednecks, mostly good old boys and gals who work for the power company, the gas company, the phone company and in construction. Bordered by rural and mostly white Blount and St. Clair counties to the north and east, it has become the poor side of town. The money went south. The black migration from the city has in recent years about taken over what was at one time the largest, mostly white suburb in the country called Center Point, which was the half-way point between the industrial city of Birmingham and the countryside in the 1950s and ’60s.
Now that the citizens of the United States have elected the first African-American president in U.S. history, however, there are racist, conservative activist groups popping up all over the place — and not just the Tea Party. One man has put the area on the map like no other.
Michael B. Vanderboegh of Pinson hit the national spotlight last week and is now under serious federal law enforcement scrutiny since calling for right-wing militia-style activists to toss bricks through the windows of Democrats on his SipseyStreetIrregulars blog, designed to appeal to the so-called Three Percenters, or three percent of American gun owners with the most radical view of the Second Amendment.
Speaker Pro Tempore Demetrius Newton, who is the first African American to serve as Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, has officially endorsed Giles Perkins for Attorney General and will assist Perkins in his bid as the Jefferson County Chair for the campaign, according to a press release from the Perkins campaign.
Newton, who has been awarded the “Outstanding Lawyer Award” by the Alabama Lawyer Association and the Alabama Poultry and Egg Association, was drawn to Perkins because of his strong vision for leadership in the state, he said.
“Alabama needs a leader who will balance the interests of Alabama with those of our citizens. I believe Attorney Perkins will be that kind of a leader. He was taught you don’t lie, you don’t cheat, and you don’t steal,” Newton said. “It is time we brought this simple code to Alabama public life.”
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., The Associalized Press — NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law yesterday redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry.
The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Bob Riley says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.
The law took the state’s engineering community by surprise.
“It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi,” said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi (p) is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.
Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from the University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate.”
“I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it,” said Lawson. “The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon’s Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
