News Day

 France birds glue traps, Is the contested French tradition of glue-hunting songbirds. President Emmanuel Macron of France has ordered hunters in his country to stop trapping song birds using glue- this has been an old tradition. Despite the resistance, conservationists have welcomed the beginning of the end of what they see as a barbaric practice from a bygone era. This old hunting tradition known as birdliming which has gradually been eradicated across Europe following the EU’s 1979 Birds Directive. In five departments in the south east, around Marseille and Nice, some 5,000 to 6,000 hunters use glue-covered sticks to trap thrushes and blackbirds in a process they call chasse à la glu. The songbirds are put in cages and used as “callers” to attract fellow wild birds with their melodic chants, thus providing hunters with easy pickings. At the end of the season the birds are, in theory, released back into the wild. Last year French hunters were allowed to trap more than 40,000 song...

 University of Alabama coronavirus, 1,000 students testing positive for COVID-19. Coronavirus  cases are continuing to climb at the University of Alabama, with more than 1,000 students testing positive for COVID-19 since the start of on-campus classes last week. The school's  COVID-19 dashboard  shows that 492 students across their three campuses tested positive for the virus between Tuesday and Thursday, bringing the total number of cases since Aug. 19 — when the fall semester began — to 1,063. Those numbers do not include the 305 students who tested positive prior to the start of on-campus classes. A majority of the cases are at the university's main campus in Tuscaloosa. According to the dashboard, 1,043 students have tested positive since Aug. 19. In a  press release  on Friday, the university said that none of the students who have tested positive have been hospitalized. "Our exposure notification efforts have revealed no evidence of virus transmission...

 Horses killed in France,  Fear and mystery as dozens of horses. A series of attacks on horse and ponies across  France  have left police baffled and struck fear into the country’s equestrian community. Agriculture minister Julien Denormandie said there had been up to 30 attacks, from the mountainous Jura region in the east to the Atlantic coast, in what are thought to have been ritual mutilations. Many have taken place this summer although one attack was registered in February, according to the news magazine Le Point. Most often, an ear – usually the right one – has been cut off, recalling matadors taking trophies in a bullring. “We are excluding nothing,” Mr Denormandie told France-Info on Friday, before heading to a riding club in the Saone-et-Loire region, in east central France, where a horse was attacked a day earlier. “Ears are cut off, eyes removed, an animal is emptied of its blood,” he said, spelling out the injuries suffered by the animals. “All means are ...

 Greece girl unicorn, 3-Year-Old Clinging to Unicorn Float Is Rescued. A Greek ferry came to the rescue after a young girl clinging to an inflatable unicorn toy floated out into open sea. The  dramatic rescue was caught on video  and even earned praise from the Greek Prime Minister, according to the New York Times.  The captain of the ferry who rescued the 3-year-old said he only did what anyone would do. Grigoris Karnesis and the crew from his ferry pulled the little girl, along with her inflatable toy unicorn, from the waters near the port of Rio on Monday. "The child was flabbergasted," he told Skai TV. "She was terrified, and that is why she had grabbed so firmly onto her inflatable." The ferry captain couldn't believe what he was seeing at first and quickly had to maneuver his 331-foot-long ferry next to the toy so someone could get her without toppling the inflatable unicorn,  he recounted to the New York Times . He described how his brother, the shi...

 UCLA researcher arrested amid investigation into alleged China ties (Details). A Chinese national and University of California-Los Angeles researcher has been arrested for allegedly throwing away a damaged hard drive while the FBI was investigating him for transferring sensitive U.S. data to China’s National University of Defense Technology.  The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that 29-year-old Guan Lei "falsely den[ied] his association with the Chinese military" during interviews with federal law enforcement officials. Lei has since admitted that he participated in Chinese military training.  According to authorities, one of Lei's faculty advisors in China also served in the Chinese military.  The Justice Department further alleged that Lei hid digital files from federal law enforcement and lied about having contact with the Chinese consulate during his time in the U.S.  Lei faces one felony count of destruction of evidence, which carries a m...

 Musk Neuralink news pig, This special series explores the evolving relationship. With grudging assistance from a trio of pigs,  Neuralink  co-founder Elon Musk showed off the startup’s state-of-the-art neuron-reading brain implant and announced that the system has received the Food and Drug Administration’s preliminary blessing as an experimental medical device. During today’s demonstration at Neuralink’s headquarters in Fremont, Calif., it took a few minutes for wranglers to get the swine into their proper positions for what Musk called his “Three Little Pigs demonstration.” One of the pigs was in her natural state, and roamed unremarkably around her straw-covered pen. Musk said the second pig had been given a brain implant that was later removed, showing that the operation could be reversed safely. After some difficulty, a third pig named Gertrude was brought into her pen. As she rooted around in the straw, a sequence of jazzy electronic beeps played through the ...