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By JEREMIAH WAKAYA, NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 17 – The Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife has constituted a multi-agency team to probe the deaths of nine out of eleven rhinos translocated to the Tsavo East National Park in Voi last month.
Cabinet Secretary Najib Balala who visited the park on Tuesday announced the team will be headed by an officer from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
The team whose report is set to be released on Monday next week will also include a tourism ministry official, and two veterinary officers from the University of Nairobi and the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation.
Balala however assured that the remaining two rhinos were being monitored closely adding that they had not shown any sign of ill-health.
“We’ve confirmed this morning that the two surviving rhinos are in good health. One was seen in Maungu yesterday and the other was around the sanctuary that had been set up for them this, this morning,” the CS said.
In the interest of a tamperproof investigation Balala told the media on Tuesday that he had directed all reports by probe teams and the government chemist investigating the deaths of the rhinos be presented exclusively to him.
“All those reports should not come to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), they should be brought to me. KSW have to withdraw because if we want an independent investigation, it is important that KSW is not involved,” Balala remarked.
On Friday, Capital FM News broke the unfortunate news of the demise of eight rhinos out of eleven that had been moved to Tsavo National Park; eight having been relocated from the Nairobi National Park and six from the Nakuru National Park.
A total of fourteen rhinos had been earmarked for relocation.
Following the unprecedented deaths, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife issued a statement suspending the relocation exercise which was being undertaken by the KWS in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Although preliminary reports point to high salinity of water as the probable cause of the deaths of the nine translocated rhinos, CS Balala said the probe team will particularly seek to establish if there was negligence of the part of officers managing the translocation exercise.
According to Balala, KWS wardens at the Tsavo National Park said the nine rhinos that died had registered an increased uptake of water, signaling abnormal dehydration rates.
Similar exercises in the past have recorded impressive success rates with only eight mortalities out of 149 rhinos relocated between 2005 and 2017.
Official records have also shown high success rates in the recent months with a single mortality being reported out of 74 rhinos relocated between July 2017 and February 2018.
Balala said all the eighteen horns of the nine rhinos that died at the Tsavo East National Park had been secured awaiting transportation to KWS headquarters.
“The beauty is that all these horns have transmitters and electronic chips so we can actually verify,” he revealed.
The home winning streak. The unbeaten record. The incredible run Florida had been on since last it lost to Auburn.
On a weekend filled with upsets, next week changed drastically for Florida. Instead of the game at LSU being for supremacy, it's for survival as far as Florida is concerned.
For everyone who figured Saturday night would be a celebration of Wilber Marshall and a tuneup for LSU, it turned out to be a lesson that should have been ingrained in our brain cells by now.
It's not about the statistics and point spreads. It's about young men who have good days and bad days and the younger they are the more likely that one of those bad days is around the corner.
By the time the Gators took the field Saturday night, the college football world had been turned upside down. Seven unbeaten teams from BCS conferences had already lost in the previous 24 hours.
Because it's college football. It's a sport of momentum and adrenaline and passion. And a lot of times, it's about a team hearing how bad it is and deciding to show how good it can be.
That was Auburn Saturday night.
Two weeks ago, quarterback Brandon Cox was benched because he was playing terribly. On Saturday night, he looked like a left-handed Dan Marino at times, especially in the first half.
Florida, on the other hand, looked disorganized on offense and porous on defense. To be honest, in the first half it looked like the game I thought we might see next week. Now, who knows what to expect?
Lessons were handed out in The Swamp and one of them is something the young players know now � The Swamp can't do it alone.
And you have to show up in the first half.
Give Florida credit for fighting back. That's where the Gator fans in full throat finally made an impact.
�I thought we were going to come back and win the game,� Urban Meyer said.
The flaws we have seen in this Florida team during the first four games were in full bloom in the first half against Auburn.
Penalties hurt. The secondary struggled. The offense relied too much on Tim Tebow runs that were going nowhere.
You knew the Gators couldn't play that poorly for an entire game. It was much better in the second half. Two freshmen made huge plays to give the Gators a spark � Major Wright forcing a fumble and Joe Haden jumping on it. Florida turned that play into a touchdown, then had a huge drive to tie the score.
Momentum was on Florida's side. But when the Gators got the ball back, the drive they needed went backwards. And Auburn, a team counted out two weeks ago, was able to make just enough plays to set up the game-winning field goal.
Every game is its own game.
It didn't matter that Auburn had lost at home to Mississippi State. The Tigers have been a better team on the road the last two years anyway.
It didn't matter that Florida dismantled Tennessee two weeks ago on this same field. Different day, different game.
The bottom line is that Florida scored only 17 points and you don't win many games scoring 17 points. Speed only helps when the other team doesn't have it. Auburn is fast. Auburn has sure tacklers. Auburn's defense came in to this game ranked third in the conference.
And, as I tried to tell everyone during the week, it was Auburn. Florida-Auburn delivered another game that made one side ecstatic and one side heartbroken. That's what it does.
A year ago, Florida used the Auburn loss to re-focus and come together as a team. It will be a tougher task this year with LSU on the horizon. But some day, somewhere, the lessons learned from this game will help.
�We'll find out,� Meyer said.
That's college football, a game played by young men who make mistakes. It's a game that offers hope when it seems the darkest. That's why thousands of Auburn fans poured into Ben Hill Griffin Stadium just 14 days removed from back-to-back home losses.
They know it's college football.
I think almost all of the major tax expenditures could be trimmed, curtailed or eliminated. I don’t think any stand scrutiny with the possible exception of charitable contributions. But even there, if you said that’s got to change because the other ones are changing, I would not object.
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John Haltigan was born 200 years ago on April 23, 1819, in Kilkenny city. He was reared alongside his five brothers and four sisters on Upper Patrick Street.
Haltigan became an apprentice printer and at the age of 26, he married Catherine Keating. He also became involved in the nation's struggle for freedom.
Haltigan became foreman printer at the Kilkenny Journal and settled on a small farm on the outskirts of the city.
In the summer of 1855, a tailor called Joseph Denieffe traveled from New York back to his native Kilkenny as a representative of the Emmet Monument Association, a precursor to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Denieffe was in Kilkenny to establish contacts with the Fenian movement there. Haltigan introduced Denieffe to all the major players in the Fenian movement in Kilkenny and across Ireland.
Read more: Was a Galway Fenian wrongly hanged in Canada 150 years ago?
Haltigan was head center for the Kilkenny Fenian movement, recruiting members to the organization while also still working on the Kilkenny Journal. In November 1861 Haltigan served as an honorary pallbearer for the funeral of Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus in Dublin. It was a large event drawing thousands of people and it highlighted Haltigans standing within the movement.
In 1863 James Stephens launched The Irish People newspaper and Haltigan became foreman printer. He had to move to Dublin and lodged in a boarding house with his 16-year-old son who worked as an apprentice printer. While in Dublin Haltigan trained IRB recruits and drew the attention of the authorities.
On September 14th, 1865 police raided the office of The Irish People and arrested Haltigan. He was charged with treason and on November 27th he was tried alongside John O'Leary, Thomas Clarke Luby, O'Donovan Rossa, and Michael Moore as part of what became known as The Fenian Conspiracy.
On December 8th Haltigan was found guilty of treason against the crown. The father of seven was sentenced to seven years penal servitude.
Haltigan was sent to Portland and Pentonville prisons. After years of harsh treatment in these places, Haltigan was granted an early release in March 1869 and arrived back in Kilkenny where thousands lined the streets to welcome him back.
Prison had broken Haltigans health, he arrived back to the marble city weak and frail and by 1873 he left for America where he would spend the next five years with his son who had set up life in the states as a printer of his own newspaper The Sunday Citizen.
Haltigan returned to Ireland in 1877 and worked as a printer for The Cork Examiner. It was in the city by the Lee that John Haltigan died on July 10th, 1884 at the age of 66. The Kilkenny native was escorted by Fenians back to the marble city on the train and was buried in St Patrick's cemetery.
The funeral of John Haltigan was one of the biggest seen in Kilkenny. The St Patrick's brass band escorted the funeral cortege through the streets of the city as crowds thronged to pay their last respects. As Haltigan's coffin was lowered into the ground the band struck up God Save Ireland.
A large impressive Celtic cross was later erected over Haltigans resting place. Haltigans wife Catherine died in 1899 and was buried with her husband.
Kilkenny did not forget its Fenian hero. A street and terrace were named in his honor and numerous commemorations have been held over the years.
Fixed-line NBN customers are benefitting from competition among Internet service providers to perform well in the ACCC's speed tests, though some consumers continue to get much lower speeds than others on the same plan.
The ACCC's third Measuring Broadband Australia report, released on Monday, shows that TPG Telecom was the fastest, followed by Aussie Broadband, iiNet, Optus, Telstra and MyRepublic.
Aussie Broadband took top spot in the second report, with TPG third, and iiNet, part of the TPG stable, second.
The report, prepared by UK outfit SamKnows, found that 69% of all tests recorded download speeds that were more than 90% of plan speeds. Only 7% of tests recorded speeds that were less than half of the plan maximum.
“Industry says it is working hard to contact customers whose NBN connections aren’t able to deliver the maximum speeds of their plan,” Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims said.
Broadband speeds did not slow down a great deal during the busy hours - 7pm to 11pm - with average speeds falling by 11 percentage points compared to the average.
“We are pleased that the Measuring Broadband Australia program is being taken very seriously by ISPs and is delivering noticeable improvements to customers’ broadband speeds,” Sims said.
“We note NBN Co has reported that congestion has increased slightly in recent months. Our results suggest that ISPs not featured in this report could be contributing to this, as the overall results featured in this MBA report do not show an upward trend in congestion.
“We want to encourage consumers, particularly those with smaller ISPs, to register their interest in the program so we can provide statistically significant results for a wider range of services.
Testing of 25, 50, and 100 Mbps plans and ADSL services was carried out in August and involved 950 NBN and ADSL services supplied by 15 ISPs, using 171,000 download speed tests. The results are statistically significant with a small sampling error.
When it comes to evading accountability, corporate America is endlessly inventive. Recently, private government contractors have been fighting disclosure of crucial information in virtually every context nationwide, including with a sneaky maneuver called a "reverse Public Records Act." A case in Los Angeles is the latest example.
New Flyer, a bus manufacturer based in Winnipeg, Canada, signed a $500-million contract with Metro in 2013 for up to 900 compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles. To win the bid, New Flyer volunteered to create 250 jobs, both locally and within the United States, with good wages and benefits. Under the U.S. Employment Plan, that promise allowed New Flyer to win an $18-million credit on the contract.
The idea behind the U.S. Employment Plan is simple: If taxpayers put millions of dollars into the pockets of private corporations for infrastructure, the least the companies could do is contribute to the local economy with good-paying jobs.
So far, so good. The problem arose when Jobs to Move America, the public interest group that created the U.S. Employment Plan, wanted to assess whether New Flyer had actually kept its word.
If companies can declare job and compensation information a trade secret, the government can’t ensure compliance.
New Flyer gave generalized information, but sought to heavily redact all specifics like hourly wages, job location and descriptions, and benefit packages, citing "trade secrets and proprietary information."
When Metro said they would release the full information anyway, New Flyer sued in May to block the release. Such lawsuits are known as "reverse Public Records Act" requests; the whole idea is to keep the public in the dark.
New Flyer is hardly the only offender. Whether it's privately contracted call centers, water systems operators, retirement plan managers, charter schools or manufacturers of infrastructure, companies all over the country are using the vague "trade secret" claim to reduce disclosure on how public money gets used.
Donald Cohen, executive director of the organization In the Public Interest, highlighted a case in Texas in which a journalist asked for traffic projections for a privately built toll road project. "The company said no, it's a trade secret, and the courts backed them up. What's more public than how many people are going to be on the road?"
The effect of these maneuvers is fairly obvious: If companies can declare job and compensation information a trade secret, the government can't ensure compliance with a host of rules and standards, including prevailing or living wage laws.
Metro actually didn't contest New Flyer's lawsuit, leaving Jobs to Move America to intervene. Which brings us to a hearing last week in downtown Los Angeles.
New Flyer attorney John Danos asserted that wage and benefit information for specific types of employees would harm the company by exposing its operations to competitors.
Paul Moore, the attorney for Jobs to Move America, countered that the contract stipulated that job and compensation information would be public, and that some of the documents submitted to Metro that New Flyer wanted redacted weren't even marked as confidential. "New Flyer entered into this arrangement voluntarily," Moore summarized. "Now it's saying that the public is not entitled to know whether those promises are actually being fulfilled."
Judge Mary H. Strobel sided with Jobs to Move America. In a lengthy ruling, she argued that the information New Flyer wanted to keep under wraps was not a trade secret. More important, she said that even if it was, the public interest in knowing this information outweighed any damage it might cause.
There's another issue here as well: Because L.A. Metro did nothing to fight New Flyer's objection in court, it pushed the cost of obtaining public documents off to public interest groups. That undermined the whole idea of the Public Records Act, which is to make it quick and easy for the public to obtain information. In the ruling, Judge Strobel said that Metro abdicated its responsibility to defend its decision.
None of this has prevented Metro from contracting with New Flyer. In fact, they just announced another contract this week, for 100 zero-emission buses. That decision came over Jobs to Move America's objection that Metro should not give New Flyer a new contract when it hasn't even proven it met the terms of the last one.
The fact that companies think they can get away with this shows how much ground government has given up. As we shift more and more functions onto the private sector, companies pull every trick in the book to hide disclosure of what they're doing with public money. That has implications for rooting out corruption, breach of contract, and the public's right to know.
At least last week's decision, however, suggests it's possible for transparency to make a comeback.
David Dayen contributes to the Nation, the Intercept and the New Republic.
The Center’s focus on immigration and poverty is motivated by the important role immigrants play in the U.S. economy, and by the Center’s location in the Central Valley of California. Each of our other research areas: Labor Markets and Poverty, the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty, and the Non-traditional Safety Net hold questions that are unique to the immigrant experience.
See below for more information on research projects and other resources related to this topic.
The Center’s focus on immigration and poverty is motivated by the important role immigrants play in the U.S. economy, and by the Center’s location in the Central Valley of California. Each of our other research areas: Labor Markets and Poverty, the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty, and the Non-cash Safety Net hold questions that are unique to the immigrant experience.
For example, what is the connection between low skilled workers’ wages, inequality and immigration? How do access and take-up of safety-net programs among immigrant populations differ from native populations? How does the process of immigrant assimilation affect intergenerational mobility?
Our Research Affiliates across a wide range of disciplines are employing both quantitative and qualitative research strategies to shed light on these important questions.
Exclusionary immigration policies have led to a sizeable undocumented population that is largely barred from access to resources in the United States, however there is little research that looks at the impact of legal status on immigrants’ psychological wellbeing.
These briefs are short and informative analyses of our research relating to poverty policies. Policy Briefs deliver our cutting-edge research directly to policy makers, researchers, and stakeholders in an accessible format.
Peterborough’s Trading Standards team is encouraging people thinking of buying a dog to be wary of illegally imported puppies.
There have been a number of cases in and around Peterborough recently where puppies are being brought into the UK illegally.
Two young puppies that were sold subsequently died and Peterborough Trading Standards are currently investigating.
A number of other puppies have had to be placed in quarantine at the owner’s expense, after it was discovered that they were imported directly from Lithuania.
Trading Standards recommends that people make sure they know where their new puppy has come from and that it has had a health check by a vet.

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