Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Scientists are blaming pollution around the South American lake and are searching for answers about the critically endangered species.
Thousands of critically endangered frogs have been found dead in South America, leaving scientists scrambling to find the cause. The most likely culprit, they say: pollution.
The Titicaca water frog (Telmatobius coleus), one of the largest aquatic frogs in the world, goes by a unique nickname. It has "amazingly baggy skin, which gives it the common name scrotum frog," says National Geographic explorer Jonathan Kolby, a PhD student who studies frogs in Latin America.
"Their wrinkly skin is an adaptation to help them absorb more oxygen from the water, possibly because they live at such high altitudes"-around Lake Titicaca along the Peru and Bolivia border, says Kolby.
"But they do look pretty funny," Kolby adds about the large frogs. (The frogs were even nominated as one of the world's ugliest animals.)
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, this article was chonsen not only for its news value but also for the curiously funny title!]
I wouldn't.
The reason there will be no change is because the people who stand to lose
from change have all the power. And the people who stand to gain from
change have none of the power.
Machiavelli
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This is oft attributed to Machiavelli, but it's not his. It's actually a mis-quote of someone else, a link to which elludes me at present. ...Still, it's a good point.]
...You're Statistically More Likely To Be Killed By Hillary Clinton Than
By A Shark.
The ruling simply reinforces what Salvadorans have said all along. This mining giant, whose Pac Rim Cayman subsidiary sued El Salvador after it didn't get a mining license, did not deserve to get a license because it never fulfilled all the legal requirements for one. The tribunal should have thrown out the case from the start.
And the Pac Rim subsidiary that filed the suit was a Cayman shell company. OceanaGold, which purchased Pac Rim in 2013 and financed the lawsuit, will never have to pay for the environmental and social damage its mining "exploration" left behind. Hence, in the end, El Salvador simply won the right to implement its own laws. In other words, like the rest of these tribunal cases in the World Bank Group's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), there is no such thing as a "win" for the country getting sued.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on Wednesday rejected land leases purchased at public auction in February by climate activist and author Terry Tempest Williams, refunding William's payment and revoking the leases because the environmentalist publicly vowed to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
"We are disappointed in the agency's decision to hold us to a different standard than other lessees," Williams and her husband, Brooke Williams, responded to the BLM's decision in a statement. "The agency claims that it cannot issue the leases because we did not commit to developing them. The BLM has never demanded that a lease applicant promise to develop the lease before it was issued. In fact, a great many lessees maintain their leases undeveloped for decades, thereby blocking other important uses of the lands such as conservation and recreation."
Most Daily News Summary entries come from The Progressives' Chat Forum, which typically receives around 500 comments per day. Join us right now by picking the top list entry on this page.