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Friday, 19 December 2014

Pakistan investigating British doctor's ties to Taliban school massacre


pakistan

© Reuters / Fayaz Aziz

A local cameraman films in front of an army soldier at the Army Public School, which was attacked by Taliban gunmen, in Peshawar, December 17, 2014.



As Britain's Pakistani community mourns the massacre of 132 children in Tuesday's school siege, a British doctor with links to the Taliban is being investigated by Pakistan's intelligence service, suspected of involvement in the attack.

Former NHS surgeon Mirza Tariq Ali fled the UK last year. He is reported to have become a senior Pakistani Taliban commander after his attempts to join Islamic State in Syria were hindered.


Pakistani authorities are currently investigating whether Ali could have been the commander of the six gunmen who opened fire on the school in Pakistan, leaving a total of 141 dead and a further 125 injured.


The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack. Pakistani officials believe that several factions of the local Pakistani Taliban orchestrated the siege from the border of neighboring Afghanistan.


Ali is reported to have had links with radical UK cleric Anjem Choudary while he was practicing medicine in the UK.


The doctor, who now operates under the moniker Dr Abu Obaidah Al-Islamabadi, has been described as "someone of interest" to the inquiry into the mass shooting. He is known to have appeared in a recruitment video for the Taliban in November, where he urged Pakistanis to stop resisting sharia law.


Ali was arrested by UK police in 2013 and charged with violent disorder after attending a demonstration in central London, organized by Choudary, where he advocated jihad in Syria. He was due to stand trial in May, but fled the country.


He was arrested in Croatia and deported to Pakistan, where he is reported to have risen quickly through Taliban ranks.


Ali was, however, prosecuted in his absence, and has been sentenced to 15 months in jail for Islamic sectarian violence; the first ever successful conviction of its type in the UK.





Comment: Let's get this straight. Ali is arrested in UK, somehow manages to 'flee' before trial, is then arrested in Croatia, deported to Pakistan, where he then joins up with the Taliban and "quickly rises" through its ranks?! Then, his prosecution in absentia is the first of its kind (how convenient!). Give us a break. His story is similar to Gladio operator Abdullah Catli and numerous other 'terrorists' who always manage to stay one step ahead of the law (e.g., escaping from military prisons). This just smacks of manufactured terror, with Anjem Choudary perhaps playing the role of a Fethullah Gulen-like handler.

Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog


Blackmail opportunity? More than 48,000 federal employees affected by background check hack


© Shutterstock



The Office of Personnel Management is alerting more than 48,000 federal employees their personal information may have been exposed following a breach at KeyPoint Government Solutions, which conducts background investigations of federal employees seeking security clearances.

The total number of employees affected is 48,439, according to an email from OPM Chief Information Officer Donna Seymour obtained by Nextgov


Seymour said OPM worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the incident, "and while we found no conclusive evidence that [personally identifiable information] was taken by the intruder, OPM has elected to conduct these notifications out of an abundance of caution."


Affected employees will receive free credit monitoring.


DHS spokesman S.Y. Lee on Thursday evening told Nextgov the breach was detected by a DHS entity.


"Recently, the DHS National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center became aware of a potential intrusion of a private sector company that conducts U.S. government security background investigations for OPM," he said in a statement. "Working with OPM and other interagency partners, the NCCIC, per standard procedure, deployed an on-site [U.S.-Computer Emergency Readiness Team] to assess and mitigate any risks identified."


"As we examine the potential impact on DHS employees, we are committed to ensuring the privacy of our workforce and will take all appropriate measures to safeguard it," he added.


Background investigators conduct interviews with employees or applicants seeking security clearances, as well as their family members, neighbors and former employers. Investigators also compile police and court records on interview subjects. Their reports are used by federal officials to determine potential employees' suitability to hold security clearances and are a treasure trove of personal information.


An OPM statement provided to Nextgov read in part: "We take very seriously our responsibility to protect sensitive data in background investigations, and our top priority is to make sure the networks that handle that data are secure. KeyPoint has worked closely with OPM to implement additional security controls that will afford its network greater protection."


It's the second time this year hackers have targeted a private background-check company. Over the summer, USIS, once the government's largest provider of checks, revealed its systems had been breached, potentially exposing information on 25,000 employees. OPM subsequently temporarily suspended work with the company in the wake of that breach and later severed ties altogether.


"Following the discovery of the problem, KeyPoint implemented numerous controls to strengthen the security of its network," Seymour's email stated. "The immediacy with which KeyPoint was able to remediate vulnerabilities has allowed us to continue to conduct business with the company without interruption."


A month before the USIS hack, OPM's own networks were breached, with news reports indicating Chinese hackers had infiltrated OPM's databases, potentially in pursuit of the personnel files of security clearance holders.


KeyPoint did not immediately return phone calls and emails seeking comment.


DHS says it inspected other background check firms for vulnerabilities following the USIS breach.


The U.S.-CERT, the agency's cyber-response squad, analyzed similar companies for "indicators of compromise," revealed Brad Nix, US-CERT's deputy director, who spoke earlier in the week at a Washington, D.C., cyber summit.


Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog


Science and fraud are the same thing with biotech giant Monsanto


© nihongonews.wordpress



Imagine this. A killer is put on trial, and the jury, in a surprise verdict, finds him not guilty. Afterwards, reporters interview this killer. He says, "The jury freed me. It's up to them. They decide. That's what justice is all about."

Then the press moves along to members of the jury, who say: Well, we had to take the defendant's word. He said he was innocent, so that's what we ruled.


That's an exact description of the FDA and Monsanto partnership.


When you cut through the verbiage that surrounded the introduction of GMO food into America, you arrive at two key statements. One from Monsanto and one from the FDA, the agency responsible for overseeing, licensing, and certifying new food varieties as safe.


Quoted in the (October 25, 1998, "Playing God in the Garden"), Philip Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications, famously stated:



"Monsanto shouldn't have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."



From the , Volume 57, No.104, "Statement of [FDA] Policy: Foods Derived from New Plant Varieties," here is what the FDA had to say on this matter:

"Ultimately, it is the food producer who is responsible for assuring safety."



The direct and irreconcilable clash of these two statements is no accident. It's not a sign of incompetence or sloppy work or a mistake or a miscommunication. It's a clear signal that the fix was in.

No real science. No deep investigation. No convincing evidence of safety. Passing the buck back and forth was the chilling and arrogant strategy through which Pandora's Box was pried opened and GMO food was let into the US food supply.


In order for this titanic scam to work, the media had to cooperate. Reporters had to be a) idiots and b) sell-outs.


Reporters and their editors let the story die. No sane principled journalist would have cut bait, but who said mainstream reporters are sane or principled?


Underneath the Monsanto-FDA buck-passing act, there was a conscious deal to give a free pass to GMO crops. This had nothing to do with science or health or "feeding the world." It was about profits. It was also about establishing a new monopoly on food.


Not only would big agribusiness dominate the planet's food supply as never before, it would strengthen its stranglehold through patents on novel types of seeds which were engineered.


It's very much like saying, "A cob of corn is not a plant, it's a machine, and we own the rights to every one of those yellow machines."


How was Monsanto able to gather so much clout?


There was one reason and one reason only. Putting the world's food supply into fewer hands was, and is, a major item on the Globalist agenda. If it weren't, the FDA-Monsanto approval scam would have been exposed in a matter of weeks.


Major newspapers and television networks would have attacked the obvious con job like packs of wild dogs and torn it to pieces.


But once the scam had been given a free pass, the primary corporate-government tactic was to accomplish a fait accompli, a series of events that was irreversible.


In this case, it was about gene drift. From the beginning, it was well known that GMO plants release genes that blow in the wind and spread from plant to plant, crop to crop, and field to field. There is no stopping it.


Along with convincing enough farmers to lock themselves into GMO-seed contracts, Monsanto bought up food-seed companies in order to engineer the seeds...and the gene-drift factor was the ace in the hole.


Sell enough GMO seeds, plant enough GMO crops, and you flood the world's food crops with Monsanto genes.


Back in the 1990s, the prince of darkness, Michael Taylor, who had moved through the revolving door between the FDA and Monsanto several times, and is now the czar of food safety at the FDA - Taylor said, with great conviction, that the GMO revolution was unstoppable; within a decade or two, an overwhelming percentage of food grown on planet Earth would be GMO.


Taylor and others knew. They knew about gene drift, and they also knew that ownership of the world's food, by a few companies, was a prime focus for Globalist kings.


Control food and water, and you hold the world in your hand.


Here is evidence that, even in earlier days, Monsanto knew about and pushed for the Globalist agenda. Quoted by J. Flint, in his 1998 Agricultural Giants Moving Towards Genetic Monopolism, Robert Fraley, head of Monsanto's agri-division, stated:



"What you are seeing is not just a consolidation of [Monsanto-purchased] seed companies. It's really a consolidation of the entire food chain."



And as for the power of the propaganda in that time period, I can think of no better statement than the one made on January 25th, 2001, by the outgoing US Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman. As reported by the , Glickman said:

"What I saw generically on the pro-biotech [GMO] side was the attitude that the technology was good and that it was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. And there was a lot of money that had been invested in this, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. There was rhetoric like that even here in this department [USDA]. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view on some of these issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else around here spouted; it was written into my speeches."



Glickman reveals several things in these remarks: he was spineless; people at the Dept. of Agriculture were madly buying into the Monsanto cover story about feeding the world; and there had to be a significant degree of infiltration at his Agency.

The last point is key. This wasn't left to chance. You don't get a vocal majority of Dept. of Agriculture personnel spouting Monsanto propaganda merely because the fairy tale about feeding the world sounds so good. No, there are people working on the inside to promote the "social cause" and make pariahs out of dissenters.


You need special background and training to pull that off. It isn't an automatic walk in the park. This is professional psyop and intelligence work.


It isn't rinky-dink stuff. To tune up bureaucrats and scientists, you have to have a background in manipulation. You have to know what you're doing. You have to be able to build and sustain support, without giving your game away.


Psyop specialists are hired to help make overarching and planet-wide agendas come true, as populations are brought under sophisticated and pathological elites who care, for example, about feeding the world as much as a collector cares about paralyzing and pinning butterflies on a panel in a glass case.


Here is David Rockefeller, writing in his 2003 :



"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."



The Globalists play for keeps.

Owning the food of the world is part of their strike-force action plan, and Monsanto is a technocratic arm of that plan.


Meanwhile, the controlled press treats the whole sordid Monsanto/FDA story with its time-honored policy of "he said-he said." This policy dictates that stories merely present both sides of a conflict without drawing conclusions.


Monsanto's lies and crimes and cover-ups are everywhere. You could wear sunglasses and find them in the dark.


and the could sell millions more papers on the back of Monsanto stories. It would be a bonanza for them. But no. They don't care. They'd rather keep declining and losing readers. They'd rather die.


Normally, a business doesn't commit suicide, especially when it sees exactly how to resuscitate itself. But here we are dealing with an agenda which can't be disturbed. Globalism, and its agri-techno partner, Monsanto, are creating a planetary future. Major media are part and parcel of that op. They are selling it.


Again, we aren't talking about sloppy reporting or accidental omissions of fact or boggling incompetence or ignorance about science. We are talking about conscious intent to deceive.


Yes, now and then the controlled media will release a troubling piece about Monsanto. But placement and frequency are everything. How often do these stories run? Do they run as the lead or do we find them on page 3? Are reporters assigned to keep pounding on a basic story and reveal more and more crimes? Does the basic story gather steam over the course of weeks and months?


These are the decisions that make or break a story. In the case of Monsanto and the FDA, the decisions were made a long time ago.


Part of every reporter's training in how the real world works, if he has any ideals at all, is marching into his editor's office with his hair on fire demanding to be given an assignment to expose a crime. The editor, knowing the true agenda of his newspaper or television network, tells the reporter:


"We've already covered that."


"It's old news."


"People aren't interested in it."


"It's too complicated."


"The evidence you're showing me is thin."


"You'll never get to the bottom of it."


"The people involved won't talk to you."


And if none of those lies work, the editor might say, "If you keep pushing this, it would be bad for your career. You'll lose access to other stories. You'll be thought of as weird..."


This is how the game works at ground level. But make no mistake about it, the hidden agenda is about protecting an elite's op from exposure.


If NBC, for example, gave its golden boy, Brian Williams, the green light, he would become an expert on Monsanto in three days. He'd become a tiger. He'd affect a whole set of morally outraged poses and send Monsanto down into Hell.


Don't misunderstand. Brian hasn't been waiting to move in for the kill. But wind him up and point to a target and he'll go there.


However, no one at NBC in the executive offices will point him at Monsanto or the FDA.


All the major reporters at news outlets and all the elite television anchors are really psyop specialists. It's just that most of them don't know it.


One outraged major reporter who woke up and got out of the business put it to me this way: "When I was in the game, I looked at the news as a big public restroom. My one guiding principle was: don't piss on your shoes. That meant covering a story that was considered out of bounds. If I talked to the boss about one of those stories, he'd look me up and down and say, 'Hey, you pissed on your shoes. Get out of here.'"


Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog


Birds may detect approaching storm from 900km away by infrasound waves


© Alamy

The golden-winged warblers may have picked up infrasound from tornadoes, which travels through the ground.



A group of songbirds may have avoided a devastating storm by fleeing their US breeding grounds after detecting telltale infrasound waves.

Researchers noticed the behaviour after analysing trackers attached to the birds to study their migration patterns. They believe it is the first documented case of birds making detours to avoid destructive weather systems on the basis of infrasound.


The golden-winged warblers had just returned from South America to their breeding grounds in the mountains of Tennessee in 2013 when a massive storm was edging closer. Although the birds had just completed a migration of more than 2,500km, they still had the energy to evade the danger.


The storm, which spawned more than 80 tornadoes across the US and killed 35 people, was 900km away when the birds, apparently acting independently of one another, fled south, with one bird embarking on a 1,500km flight to Cuba before making the return trip once the storm had passed.



© Reed Timmer/Jim Reed Photography/Corbis

A tornado in Brisco County, Texas. The birds didn’t appear to have used changes in pressure, wind speed or precipitation to warn them of the approaching storm.



"We looked at barometric pressure, wind speeds on the ground and at low elevations, and the precipitation, but none of these things that typically trigger birds to move had changed," said David Andersen at the University of Minnesota.

"What we're left with is something that allows them to detect a storm from a long distance, and the one thing that seems to be the most obvious is infrasound from tornadoes, which travels through the ground."


The scientists had fitted trackers to 20 golden-winged warblers in 2013. Only nine returned to their breeding ground after migrating to South America. Of those nine, the researchers trapped and analysed the flight histories of five. All took evasive action to avoid the storm.


The birds started to leave their breeding grounds on 27 April 2013, when the storm was whipping up tornadoes in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. The next day, with the storm about 100km from their breeding site, the birds had moved a few hundred kilometres south east. When the storm moved over the study area, battering it with winds of up to 160 kilometres per hour, the warblers were on Florida's Gulf Coast. One flew on to Cuba.


"In five to six days, they all made this big move around the storm," Andersen said. "They all went south east in front of the storm, and then let it go by, or moved behind it. It was individual behaviour, they were several hundred kilometres away from each other most of the time." Details are reported in the journal .


The scientists cannot be sure that the birds picked up infrasound waves from the storm, but previous work in pigeons has suggested that birds might use infrasound to help them navigate. Infrasound waves range from about 0.5Hz to 18Hz, below the audible range of humans.


The discovery of the evasive action could be good news, said Andersen. "With climate change increasing the frequency and severity of storms, this suggests that birds may have some ability to cope that we hadn't previously realised. These birds seemed to be capable of making really dramatic movements at short notice, even just after returning on their northwards migration," he said.


Had the storm arrived a couple of weeks later, the birds may not have taken flight. By that time, they would have been nesting, and females especially may have been less likely to flee. "It's hard to say what would happen. It may be more advantageous to survive than stay with a nest that is going to be destroyed anyway," Andersen said.


"Biologists had not been looking at the use of infrasound in this way, but it certainly makes sense to me," said Jon Hagstrum at the US Geological Survey in California, who has studied infrasound use by pigeons. "We may find that acoustics are a pretty significant way that birds in general view their environment, much like dogs use olfaction and humans use sight."


Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog


NASA experts: California needs 11 trillion gallons to end drought


© Justin Sullivan / Getty Images



Rain has returned to California, taking pressure off of the immediate emergency of the ongoing drought via the help of several inches of recent rainfall.

But the Golden State loses about 4 trillion gallons per year, and would need roughly three times that amount to return to safe and normal levels.




"Recent rains are no reason to let up on our conservation efforts," Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board stated.




The same NASA experts who sounded the alarm over the drought's threat to the food supply are now warning that California needs some 11 trillion gallons of water to replenish to normal levels.


Eleven trillion gallons - that's the amount of water that NASA scientists say would be needed to replenish key California river basins in what they're calling the first-ever estimate of the water necessary to end an episode of drought. That 11 trillion gallons is the deficit in normal seasonal levels that NASA said a team found earlier this year in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The GRACE data, presented Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, showed those river basins losing about 4 trillion gallons per year - more than state residents use annually, NASA said.




Adding to this challenge, neighboring and nearby states in the Southwest with whom California shares some water rights have been meeting recently over the water emergencies - and making clear that it will NOT BE SHARING any additional water with the parched state:


"If anybody thought we were going to roll over and say, 'OK, California, you're in a really bad drought, you get to use the water that we were going to use,' they're mistaken," said James Eklund, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board


"Arizona has the same interest" as Colorado in ensuring its supply is protected, said Michael J. Lacey, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. "I am not sure we will express it as pointedly as that," Lacey said of Eklund's remarks.


Eklund's insistence on Colorado's water rights drew diplomatic responses from his colleagues in other states on the eve of a Las Vegas meeting of water managers. The managers, from seven states, are working on ways to ensure 40 million people in the parched Colorado River basin don't go thirsty.


"California has not sought any Colorado River water beyond its entitlement and has no intention of doing so," said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California




The ongoing droughts in the Southwest during the past decade have depleted more than 14 trillion gallons from the Colorado River basin - an amount even greater than California needs to regain normal levels.

And the worst may be yet to come:


Many experts believe the current drought is only the harbinger of a new, drier era in which the Colorado's flow will be substantially and permanently diminished.


Faced with the shortage, federal authorities this year will for the first time decrease the amount of water that flows into Lake Mead... a crucial source of water for cities from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and for millions of acres of farmland.


Reclamation officials say there is a 50-50 chance that by 2015, Lake Mead's water will be rationed to states downstream. That, too, has never happened before.


"If Lake Mead goes below elevation 1,000" - 1,000 feet above sea level - "we lose any capacity to pump water to serve the municipal needs of seven in 10 people in the state of Nevada," said John Entsminger, the senior deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.




As SHTF previously mentioned, the rationale for prepping is as strong as ever:

That's pretty harsh news, and the long term impact could be pretty serious, and just one more reason to prepare a reserve food supply and prepare a plan to deal with anything that may come.


There have been many other warning signs about the food supply and commodities markets - not the least of which include the billions in losses that corn farmers are facing due to market rejection in China and other countries as a result of GMO contamination.



Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog


Maui stands as a beacon of hope: Moving closer to beating Monsanto over new GMO Moratorium


An attorney for the SHAKA Movement in Hawaii that has been trying to uphold a democratically voted moratorium on GMOs on the island of Maui reports that residents and activists have won - an intervention in a federal lawsuit that was brought on by Monsanto and Dow trying to push their genetically modified agenda on islanders will not go through. In other words, "proponents of the recently passed GMO Initiative on Maui have been given the green light to intervene in a federal lawsuit challenging the measure."


"Honolulu attorney Michael C. Carroll, who is representing the authors of the Maui GMO initiative tells Maui Now that the group won standing on Monday to intervene in the lawsuit filed by Monsanto which seeks to delay any enforcement of the measure and ultimately to have it declared unenforceable."




The federal lawsuit filed last month against Maui County by Monsanto Co. and a unit of Dow Chemical Co. thankfully flew over judge, Barry Kurren, who has deep ties with Monsanto, Dow, and Big Ag. The judge has recently overturned a democratically voted initiative to limit GMOs on the Big Island of Hawaii. Without an up-swelling of public pressure, he could have done the same in Maui.

Kurren previously ruled that laws instigated by Kauai and Hawaii banning GMOs were not applicable because the state, not the counties, had jurisdiction over the issue. Dow and Monsanto were hoping that Kurren would rule similarly on the recent ban on GMOs passed in Maui.


Likely due to pressure concerning his questionable allegiances, Kurren reassigned the Maui case to Chief Judge Susan Oki Mollway. It is also due to the fact that both the plaintiffs and defendants had agreed earlier to allow a magistrate judge to try the case. Once the SHAKA Movement found out Kurren's ties to biotech, they withdrew their approval for Kurren to preside over the case.


Maui voters clearly voted to ban GMOs on their November 4th ballots. Only a vote by the Maui County Council can lift the ban.


Last month, Judge Kurren ruled that Maui County couldn't implement the law until he considered the lawsuit put forth by Dow and Monsanto.


Maui stands as a beacon of hope for other towns throughout the US who are interested in banning GMOs. We applaud you, SHAKA Movement!



Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog


First mountain lion seen in Kentucky since before the Civil War shot by wildlife officer


© US Fish and Wildlife Service.



A Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife officer killed a mountain lion on a Bourbon County farm on Monday, marking the first confirmed sighting of a mountain lion in Kentucky since before the Civil War, said Mark Marraccini, a spokesman for the agency.

Marraccini said a farmer spotted the cat in a tree and alerted the department. When the officer responded, he found the animal had been trapped in different tree by a barking dog and decided it was best to "dispatch it."


Mountain lions were once native to Kentucky but they were killed off here more than a century ago, Marraccini said.


Mountain lions are the largest cats found in North America and can measure up to eight feet from nose to tail and weigh up to 180 pounds. Also known as cougars, pumas, panthers and catamounts, the cats are considered top-line predators because no other species feed on them.


Marraccini said the wildlife officer shot the cat because it was about 5:30 p.m. and getting dark and he feared that it would slip away in darkness and threaten people in the nearby city of Paris.


"If that cat had left that tree, it would have disappeared into the brush and it was a fairly populated area," said Marraccini, who said it would have taken several hours and dark before a state veterinarian could retrieve the tranquilizer from her safe and get it to the scene had officials taken that route.


"It sounds good but it's pretty impractical," said Marraccini, who said the officer who shot the cat made the right call.


"That's the way the officers deemed to handle it and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be handled that way," he said.


Marraccini said a state veterinarian will conduct a necropsy on the cat Tuesday to determine if it is a wild cat or a former pet that was either released or escaped.


According to the Cougar Network, the cat is mostly confined to the western United States but is advancing east. For years, the Mississippi River has been thought to be a barrier to the mountain lion's eastern expansion. But its clear they have been getting close to Kentucky.


They have colonized in South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri, said Amy Rodrigues, a staff biologist for the Mountain Lion Foundation, and there have been sightings in recent years in Indiana and even downtown Chicago.


Rodrigues said that mountain lions each need more than 100 square miles to survive and many of the animals being killed as they expand east are young males under the age of two that have been kicked out by their mothers. They often travel east looking for deer, water and female cougars.


But Rodrigues said states that kill the animals when they enter are wrong for doing it and that the animals shouldn't cause fear. "If you're a deer, they're a little dangerous. If you're a human, not so much," she said. "Attacks on people are not that common. There have only been 22 deaths in the last 120 years."


She said people are at greater risk of dying from bee stings and lightning strikes than they are from cougar attacks.


They get a bad rap because "they are large animals with sharp teeth," Rodrigues said.


She added the presence of mountain lions in an ecosystem adds to biological diversity, which she said helps the environment recover from natural disaster and diseases that affect the fauna in a region.


Mark Dowling, a director of the Cougar Network, which advocates for the use of science to understand the animals, said the population was being pushed further and further west until the 1960s when a number of western and midwestern states began to classify them as game animals rather than vermin, and limiting people's right to kill them.


Since then, he said, the cats have been slowly reclaiming their old turf.


Marraccini said there is no official protocol about how to handle more mountain lions if they are found in Kentucky but he doubts that they will be allowed to colonize here like they have in many western states.


"Every one of them is handled on its own," said Marraccini.


Marraccini said that people and legislators probably would be opposed to allowing the cats to stay in the state. "When you have a population essentially that has had generations and generations and generations that have not had top-line predators, you think about it. You going to let your kids wait for the school bus in the dark? ..."


"From a wildlife diversity perspective, it would be a neat thing but from a social aspect, probably not," he said.


Dowling wouldn't take a position on whether the cat should have been killed but said that most states that have had the cats moving through them have just left the cats alone. In fact, he said he can't think of a state wildlife agency that shoots them on sight but he noted that South Dakota will shoot them when they enter a city.


But he said human attacks are few and far between, even in California where there are thousands of the cats, some of them living within large cities like Los Angeles.


"It's very, very rare for them to show any aggression toward humans," he said. "They, in fact, have a fear of people."


Animals like the mountain lion once near extinction or limited in their range are rebounding across the country. The first gray wolf confirmed in Kentucky in generations was shot by a hunter a year and a half ago near Munfordville.


Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog