The Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services agency kills predators like coyotes, wolves, and bears that conflict with livestock raised by ranchers. Sometimes their methods are extremely cruel. Sometimes they kill endangered species. Oversight, when it exists, is hampered by secrecy.
"Favorable weather conditions at breeding grounds for monarch butterflies in Mexico are expected to help raise their numbers to possibly more than 100 million this year, about triple of a few years ago, a study released on Thursday said."
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the nation’s chief food safety regulator, plans to start testing certain foods for residues of the world’s most widely used weed killer after the World Health Organization’s cancer experts last year declared the chemical a probable human carcinogen."
The reports aren't released to the taxpayers who funded them but the Federation of American Scientists' Government Secrecy Project publishes leaked copies. Here are 17 of the latest, from air to water, food to fuel, and much more.
"In northwestern India, the Himalaya Mountains rise sharply out of pine and cedar forests. The foothills of the Kullu Valley are blanketed with apple trees beginning to bloom. It’s a cool spring morning, and Lihat Ram, a farmer in Nashala village, shows me a small opening in a log hive propped against his house. Stout black-and-yellow native honeybees — Apis cerana — fly in and out."
"As many as 49 million people in southern Africa could be affected by a drought that has been worsened by the most severe and longest El Nino weather pattern in 35 years, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday."
At first, Ted Turner, the billionaire who invented cable news, thought of his bison as pets.
"The food industry is pressuring Congress to act before the state of Vermont requires food labels for genetically modified ingredients."
"BELLE GLADE, Fla. — Dozens of farmworkers looked up at the little yellow plane buzzing over the Florida radish field, a mist of pesticide falling from its wings."
"California, Oregon and the federal government are working on a way around congressional barriers to the removal of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River."
