Today’s comicby Matt Bors is The grueling primary:
• Beekeepers lost 44 percent of honey bee colonies in 2015: The continuing losses of honey bees took an upward turn last year. The Bee Informed Partnership, together with the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported the loss in the total number of colonies managed. That 44 percent is close to the highest annual loss over the past six years and are seen as exceeding the level thought to be sustainable by the beekeeping industry. Among the suspected causes for the alarming bee colony declines is exposure to a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. Many states, cities, universities and businesses have passed measures to restrict use of these insecticides because the EPA has delayed doing so. Said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, food futures campaigner with Friends of the Earth: “These honey bee losses reinforce what sciences continues to tell us; we must take immediate action to restrict pesticides contributing to bee declines,” “The longer we wait, the worse the situation becomes. If we do not suspend neonicotinoid pesticides immediately, we risk losing our beekeepers and harming important ecosystem functions upon which our food supply depends.”
• Big donors contribute big money to SuperPacs—$709 million so far: Check out the individuals or families that have contributed the most: Robert Mercer—$17.2 million; Tom Steyer—17 million; the Wilks family—$15.3 million; Maurice “Hank” Greenberg—$15.1 million; George Soros—$12 million; Elizabeth & Richard Uihlein—$11.1 million; Paul Singer—$10.4 million; Marilyn & James Simons—$10.13 million; Toby Neugebauer—$10.1 million; Ronald Cameron—$8.8 million.
• Poor Pluto. Kepler space probe has catalogued another 1,284 planets outside our solar system. That brings the total number of exoplanets the spacecraft has found to more than 2,000:
All of them orbit stars in a patch of sky on the Cygnus-Lyra border, where Kepler, launched in 2009, spent four years staring at 150,000 stars looking for the characteristic dimming when planets crossed their faces, until its pointing system broke down and the team had to develop a new observing strategy. Since then, Kepler has identified some 4,700 possible planets, and more keep being found.
• Loose-lipped attorneys may have risked million-dollar settlement in sexual assault case: The settlement was awarded to a woman sexually assaulted by a sheriff’s deputy in Kern County, California. But the settlement could be withdrawn because attorneys for the woman violated its terms by disclosing them to the media. The case is the second time in the past week that a police misconduct lawsuit was settled in Kern County for seven figures. Law enforcement is the county is the deadliest in the United States, according to a Guardian newspaper investigation.
• Here’s the trailer for Civilization VI, the latest entry in the strategy game series.
• Coal mine owner begins prison term Thursday, but his allies bought a judicial election Tuesday:
West Virginia coal baron Don Blankenship is slated to start a one-year prison sentence on Thursday after being convicted of conspiracy to violate mine safety rules in the lead-up to a massive explosion in one of the mines run by the company he led, Massey Energy. But his legacy still hangs over West Virginia politics.
On Tuesday, his allies helped elect a business-friendly justice, Beth Walker, to the state Supreme Court by pouring at least $2.5 million into the race, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. It's a strange ending to a story that began 12 years ago, when Blankenship spent $3 million to unseat a liberal justice and replace him with a Charleston attorney named Brent Benjamin, who went on to vote to overturn a $50 million judgment against Massey Energy.
• Lawsuit claims Chicago-area Dunkin’ Donuts stole workers wages: Two employees of the local franchise filed a suit say that the owner and director of operations had, over a decade, failed to pay employees for overtime and had routinely taken money workers’ paycheck to cover cash register shortages without getting workers’ permission to do so as state law requires.
• Some people are still betting Trump will lose:
On PredictIt, a betting exchange that specializes in political contests, thousands of gamblers would still give Trump a seven percent chance of flaming out before officially clinching the nomination in Cleveland. The odds are about the same on Betfair, a British competitor. [...]
The rules of the PredictIt market state that bets won’t be paid until the conclusion of the Republican National Convention. The payoff has nothing to do with delegates, of which Trump has plenty, or the billionaire’s position in the polls, which is obviously strong. That 7-percent slack, then, encompasses any number of the unlikely-but-still-possible ways Trump could lose the nomination: a bizarre parliamentary maneuver in Cleveland, a sudden illness, a world-ending asteroid impact.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin helps sort out WV and the role of race in… the race. Hairspray von Clownstick taps Rudy Gi911iani. Joan McCarter discovers that the Gop budget #FAIL may be bigger than anyone ever imagined. The Zodiac returns to the Senate to help them do nothing.
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