Urbanization and land-use change is accelerating in many parts of the world, leading to rapidly changing environmental conditions along urban-rural interfaces and a tendency for there to be both a disconnect and a conflict between humans and wildlife. In the Santa Barbara urban-rural interface, encountering a bobcat or even a mountain lion, while rare, is not that uncommon, and losing a pet to a coyote is a disturbingly frequent...
Read MoreOn July 19, the National Assessment of Education Progress announced that 21 percent of fourth-graders, 27 percent of eighth-graders, and 20 percent of twelfth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level on the 2010 geography assessment. As Stephanie Banchero of The Wall Street Journal puts it: “The results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card, revealed...
Read MoreThe United Nations has officially declared the food crisis in Somalia a famine, a classification used for the first time since a famine was formally declared in 1984 when conditions in Ethiopia and Somalia caused the deaths of more than a million people. The U.N. commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, said drought-ridden Somalia is currently the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world. According to a Huffington...
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