Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Young Brett Kavanaugh:
• NC flooding from Florence killed 3.4 million chickens and turkeys as well as 5,500 hogs: In a press release, North Carolina Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler said: "This was an unprecedented storm with flooding expected to exceed that from any other storms in recent memory. We know agricultural losses will be significant because the flooding has affected the top six agricultural counties in our state." The Humane Society of the United States sent an email to EcoWatch saying the animals "needlessly lost their lives," adding that “Having an emergency plan, regardless of the numbers of animals at your home, facility, or farm, is the responsibility of the humane steward caring for their welfare. If the sheer number of animals makes evacuation extremely difficult or impossible, then a hard look needs to be taken at the number of animals being cared for and the opportunity for them to be considered in an emergency plan. The cost of not doing so, as we can see here, has a devastating impact on the community, the environment and the animals, and are further examples of why we need to reduce the reliance on these massive factory farms." Poultry is North Carolina’s No. 1 agricultural industry, adding $36.6 billion a year to the state’s economy.
• Please try to suppress your surprise regarding Donald Trump’s ambassador picks: Since he took office, Donald Trump has nominated 119 ambassadors. Of those, 91.6 percent (109) are white, and 73.9 percent (88) are men. None are African American women. During Obama’s term of office, 24 black women served as ambassadors around the world. Said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was the most senior African-American woman at the State Department until her 2017 retirement: “Diversity is not a priority for this administration. It’s not on their agenda. We can’t have a foreign service in which the world sees and thinks our entire leadership is white and male.”
• Conservation biologist uses DNA to tie illegal ivory sales to poaching cartels: It’s estimated that poachers kill 40,000 of the world’s 400,000 remaining African elephants every year to get at their ivory. Beginning early in his career years ago, Sam Wasser collected elephant poop all over the continent to come up with a DNA map. With this genetic information, he could examine a load of ivory confiscated by the authorities in, say, Singapore and identify the general area where it came originated. Over time, with a couple of epiphanies along the way, it was discovered that most of the ivory came from just two areas of Africa. Like street-corner drug dealers, the poachers who do the actual killing and mutilation of elephants are mostly just surviving, not getting rich off the slaughter. And the kingpins seem untouchable. But Wasser’s DNA map could bring down one of them, the head of the Mombasa, Kenya, ivory cartel, Feisal Mohamed Ali.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Ronan Farrow replaces Les Moonves on the Hollywood Reporter’s Top 100 list. Moonves was ousted from his job as CBS CEO after Farrow revealed the former CBS chief’s sexual predation. As a consequence of revelations about them, Amazon entertainment chief Roy Price, former Pixar chief executive John Lasseter and director Brett Ratner, who were on the Top 100 list in 2017, didn’t make this year’s roster.
• Arthur Mitchell, the self-described "Jackie Robinson of ballet," has died at 84: Mitchell said: "The myth was that because you were black that you could not do classical dance. I proved that to be wrong." After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he and his mentor and instructor Karel Shook decided to create a space for the children of Harlem to study dance. In 1969, the Dance Theater of Harlem was launched as the nation's major black classical company.
• Do stoned lobsters mind being cooked alive?
Cage-free eggs. Free-range chickens. Grass-fed cows. Meat eaters who want to assuage their fears over the ethical and environmental effects of their dietary habits seem to have more options than ever when it comes to cruelty-free carnivorism. And now the owner of a lobster pound in Maine is giving customers the chance to chow down on lobsters that have been sedated with marijuana before being cooked.
Charlotte Gill, the owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, Maine, is getting lobsters high before boiling them alive, according to a report by the Mount Desert Islander.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Kavanaugh still tops the news. Greg Dworkin rounds up the latest on that front and more. New angles also include a review of the stolen documents story, and that "certain look" his clerks should have. Trump still doesn’t know how elections work.