Oil Spill=Fish Kill

The above image came from the Bayou Chaland area (see map) of Plaquemines Parish.

Although scientists are saying that the thousands of dead fish are there because of low oxygen levels. We can thank algae blooms resulting from nitrogen rich fertilizer running into the soil from agribusiness for that one.
However, scientists are also crediting none other than the Gulf Oil Spill, which scientists have almost declared plugged. Because the Bayou Caland becomes isolated during times of low tide, fish probably got stuck in a lingering cocktail with low oxygen and lots of oil.
What the scientists fail to mention is the 2,000,000 gallons of COREXIT—a chemical dispersant which is four times as toxic as oil.

In other big news, reports have surfaced—as the Governor of Pennsylvania attempts to fend off the Department of Homeland Security—that multi-national giant, Monsanto, has been employing the private security firm, Blackwater, to track and investigate activists and sympathizers. State repression is high, but not high enough for Monsanto, apparently; Blackwater’s reputation proceeds them from the brutal actions that they have become famous for executing in their persecution of Iraqi people. Meanwhile, the anti-GMO movement has intensified since the FDA’s approval of the first “edible” genetically modified animal. Blackwater has recently been linked to the CIA and the assassination of Pakistani democrat, Benazir Bhutto, among other things.
Luckily there are people crazy enough to continue to stand up to the murderous and rapacious powers of the corporatist state. Democracy Now! features an interview with anti-Monsanto activist, Percy Schmeiser, whose farm was cross-fertilized and crops destroyed by Monsanto’s GMO seeds. “I think that we feel that we have to stand up for the rights of farmers around the world,” he says. “All my life I’ve been in agriculture and worked for agricultural policies and laws. And we feel that a farmer should never, ever lose the rights to his seeds or plants, because if we do, we’re going to be back to a serf system, we’re going to be back to a feudal system, that our forefathers, our grandfathers, left countries in Europe many years ago to get away from. Now, in less than—or 100 years, we’ve come full circle, where the control is not by kings or lords or barons, but now it’s corporations.”

In natural wonders of the world news, a rare saola of Laos and Vietnam was seen recently, making this the first siting of a saola in the last 10 years!

According to Physorg.com, “Saola are so secretive and so seldom seen (no biologist has ever reported seeing one in the wild) that they have been likened to unicorns (despite actually having two horns). In fact, at least one historian has speculated that a Chinese myth of a magical unicorn, the qilin, may have derived from familiarity with saola in prehistoric China (although the species does not occur there presently, if it ever did).”