Coffee and Provocation

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• The first new carnivore has been discovered in 24 years in the wetlands of Madagascar.  Durrell's vontsira is a cat-sized animal that looks a bit like a Tasmanian Devil.
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• Lie down with dogs and get up with pot shards.  A 12,000-year-old grave in Israel contains a human skeleton whose hands rest upon the bones of a small puppy -- one of the earliest instances of dog /wolf domestication.  Ironically, there are almost no positive mentions of dogs in the Bible or the Koran.
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• Doug at Harris Hawk blog has trapped a Merlin that does not need Prozac.  Lucky bird meets luck man..
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• Camera Trap Codger is always a wizard of wildlife wonder, with spotted skunks, feral pigs, and thin lions.
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• Campbell Soup of Canada is making "Hallal Soup," which  is simply the Muslim version of kosher.   Of course, the whole kosher thing can be a bit of a scam, with companies paying rabbinical councils to certify that the foods they are making are "kosher," even when the food is not covered by kosher laws (see the side of any bottle of water for an example).  That said, the cost of making a food "kosher" is minimal and it can mean some additional oversight.  But maybe not too much.  After all, the largest kosher meat plant in the the U.S. was found to be hiring mostly illegal aliens (i.e. immigrants who entered the US without a health inspection), as well as underage workers.  Kosher does not mean ethical or healthy!  The same can be said for halal slaughter too, I have little doubt.  That said, any time we get even a little more oversight and the hope for ethics in a slaugher house, I consider that a reasonably good thing.
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• You have probably been eating halal and kosher foods for years.   According to an investigation conducted by the Daily Mail in the UK, American fast-food chains such as Domino's Pizza, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Subway all use halal meat in the U.K. without telling their customers.  The vast majority of lamb imported from New Zealand by British and American grocery stores is halal as well.  No problem there other than cholesterol and calories. 
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• There are now more free-flying Condors in Calfornia than at any time in the last 100 years.  The free-flying population of Condors in California has now reached 100 birds, and there is an additional population of free-flying Condors in Arizona.
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• Population growth is destroying the planet which makes it both ironic and outrageous that the cost of the Pope's recent visit to the U.K. was split between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and five other departments including the embattled Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the Department for Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), and the departments of communities and local government, education and international development.