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Just before daybreak, in the eerie hour after Hurricane Andrew struck southern Florida, a zoo worker named Ron Magill went to see what was left of his animals. He'd spent the night in his ranch house in suburban Miami, huddled in the master bedroom with his wife, who was nine months pregnant with their first child. They'd propped a mattress and an armoire against the sliding glass door, but could still feel it flexing beneath the bellowing wind. When the shutters flew off the windows, the pressure fell so suddenly that Magill's ears popped, as if he'd fallen from a great height. "I remember going outside afterward, and it was like 'The Wizard of Oz' in reverse," he says. "I went from the color of my living room to the black-and-white of devastation."
Across the street, a van had been flipped upside down and flung against a house; here and there trees were stuck in rooftops like toothpicks in canapés. Andrew was a Category 5 hurricane, small but tightly focussed, with winds of up to a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. It made landfall near the city of Homestead on August 24, 1992, and cut a swath through some of the state's most populous areas. When it was over, twenty-five thousand homes had been destroyed and fifteen thousand boats lost, sixty-five people were dead and a hundred thousand permanently displaced. It was the costliest natural disaster in American history up to that time.
It was also a brief window on the ecology to come. As Magill was driving to the Miami Metrozoo, where he is the communications director, he passed a troop of rhesus macaques scampering up the road, as if on the plains of Kashmir. Later, the monkeys were spotted wandering through nearby farm fields, gorging themselves on tomatoes. Elsewhere, a small antelope was found wandering the halls of an administration building, a group of juvenile baboons broke into the weight room of a private home, and a python was found dead on the beach in Miami, with two full-grown raccoons in its belly. It was as if all Florida had turned, for a moment, into Disney's Animal Kingdom.
When Magill arrived at the zoo, it was in ruins. The monorail had been wrenched from its steel stanchions, its tracks twisted like a coat hanger. A six-horse trailer had been tossed over a ten-foot fence and into the rhino enclosure, and a new five-million-dollar aviary had blown away. "It was like God had come through with a twenty-five-mile-wide weed whacker and just levelled the place," he says. Miraculously, though, almost all the animals had survived: the zookeepers had herded them into a few bunkerlike buildings. The escapees that Magill had seen were mostly from private collections.
Florida is an "Ellis Island for exotic animals," Magill says. Some twelve thousand shipments of wildlife enter the country at the Port of Miami every year, second in number only to Los Angeles, and the state is home to thousands of pet stores, breeders, and animal-research facilities. "We're a biological cesspool of introduced life," another biologist told me. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates that between three and four thousand primates escaped during the hurricane, together with as many as fifteen thousand other animals, including parrots, gazelles, wallabies, six mountain lions, and an Asian pheasant caught loping down the Florida Turnpike. The majority were rounded up or exterminated. (A rumor soon spread that the roving macaques, which were from a primate-research center, had been infected with AIDS. "It wasn't true," Magill says. "But pretty soon people were in the streets shooting them with shotguns. It was completely surreal.") What happened to the rest isn't clear.
Only a few months earlier, for instance, a new warehouse for exotic reptiles had opened in Homestead. The owners couldn't afford to build a stormproof facility, so they'd rented an old greenhouse instead. "It was really makeshift," Patrick Reynolds, a lieutenant with Florida Fish and Wildlife, told me. "Everything was in Dixie cups and plastic dishes—stacks and stacks of them. The little ones were for frogs and scorpions and tarantulas. The larger ones were for snakes." Reynolds remembers seeing hundreds of Burmese pythons among the stock. They were just babies then, a few inches long, but would grow into some of the world's largest and deadliest reptiles. "And, well, Hurricane Andrew came through and the wind just took them, and—whoooooo!—off they went. There wasn't one stick of that greenhouse left."
Curled up in their flat plastic containers, those animals could have flown for miles—Frisbees, flung by the storm. Or so Reynolds and other wildlife managers speculate. Most of the animals would have died in flight, victims of what Reynolds calls "the blender effect." But a few may have survived long enough for a landing, in some saw-grass marsh or a cypress slough, and slithered off in search of food or a mate. The wind was blowing west that day, straight for the Everglades.
To a Burmese python, Florida offers more than freedom from a cage, more than a warm spot on a chilly continent. It offers virgin hunting grounds. The peninsula last began to emerge from the sea around a hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago, when the waters of the Caribbean, drained by glaciers to the north, gradually drew back to reveal a vast seabed, table flat beneath its scruff of vegetation. Much of the state is barely above sea level—one reason it's so vulnerable to hurricanes—and shrinking steadily. At the height of the last ice age, it was more than twice its current size. As one biologist put it, "Florida was underwater not too long ago and it will be again soon. Global warming is gonna fix this problem."
The peninsula is almost an island, in ecological terms: water on three sides, frost on the fourth. Its isolation has preserved an odd menagerie of prehistoric creatures—alligators and crocodiles, sawfish and sea turtles—but discouraged many immigrants. With no tropical neighbors to lend it species, Florida has been colonized mostly by northerners: red-tailed hawks, white-tailed deer, raccoons, and opossums. They've been joined by an abundance of birds and a handful of tropical castaways: frogs and snails rafted over from the Caribbean and South America, spiders ballooned in on storms. And yet, compared with most areas of similar warmth and fecundity, southern Florida has few native species. "Look at our lizards," Scott Hardin, the exotic-species coördinator for Florida Fish and Wildlife, told me. "We have sixteen. Cuba alone has eighty-three." To those lucky enough to find it, in other words, the state is less Ellis Island than Club Med: an exclusive seaside getaway, far from the fang and claw of the usual tropical crowd.
The Everglades have existed for only about five thousand years, and for most of that time they've been left to themselves. When people first arrived, near the end of the last ice age, Florida was a windswept savanna roamed by mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and giant armadillos. As the climate turned wet and warm, the great beasts died off—what the heat didn't kill, the hunters did—and the prairie slowly rotted to marsh. It was a landscape unlike any other on the continent, a "soggy confusion" of land and water, as Michael Grunwald writes in his epic history, "The Swamp." Though it lacked the dizzying diversity of the Amazon, no other place had its mixture of tropical and temperate species—southern crocodiles next to northern alligators—and a few so odd they seemed to come from another planet: ghost orchids, pig frogs, strangler figs, and carnivorous plants.
The Spanish, beginning in 1513, planted their flag on the coast along with a few of their favorite crops: citrus trees and sugarcane, wheat and barley. But the Everglades still belonged to the natives. When Ponce de León tried to prove otherwise, they shot him with a poison arrow. The marsh was too wet for farming, too unpleasant for settling. One naturalist accused it of furnishing "as much laceration and as many annoyances to the square inch as any place I have ever seen." Another, Grunwald notes, caught a third of a million mosquitoes in a single trap in a single night. By 1897, when an explorer named Hugh Willoughby crossed the Everglades in a dugout canoe, most of North America had long since been tamed, but southern Florida, in Willoughby's words, was "as much unknown to the white man as the heart of Africa."
The colonists eventually carried the day, of course—with some help from the Corps of Engineers. Marshes were drained, canals dredged, bedrock ground into a mean soil. But it was only in the nineteen-sixties, after plants like hydrilla and water hyacinth, imported as ornamentals, had clogged up canals and irritated pleasure boaters, that people began to notice how thoroughly the landscape had changed. Where stands of coco plum and mahogany once stood, there were now thickets of Brazilian pepper, a relative of poison ivy. Where meadows of purple muhly grass grew, there were forests of Australian melaleuca, their blossoms as blandly scented as fresh-cut potatoes. After five centuries of turning pine groves to orange groves, Floridians had settled on an image of how nature should look. And these plants didn't belong.
The invasion, though, had just begun. Over the next fifty years, Florida's plant nurseries were joined by a thriving exotic-wildlife trade, sending a ragged parade of escapees into the wild: parakeets, peafowl, swamp eels, and giant ratlike capybaras. Troops of runaway squirrel monkeys were swinging from trees in Fort Lauderdale long before Hurricane Andrew, and spiny-tailed iguanas were lounging on branches in Boca Grande. Pet stores made a habit of bringing in new exotics every year. Iguanas were in fashion for a while, then marmosets and poison-arrow frogs. "In the eighties, everyone wanted furry animals," Patrick Reynolds recalls. "Cougars and lions and tigers. Those were the cocaine-cowboy days. Then, in the early nineties, the reptile explosion started."
Florida now has more exotic lizard species than there are natives in the entire Southeast. On a single tree you could conceivably find plants and animals from six continents, including parrots from South America, mynah birds and Old World climbing ferns from Asia, vervet monkeys from Africa, ladybird beetles from Australia, and feral cats from Europe, via Africa and Asia. In some cases, the recent immigrants would be more genetically diverse than their cousins back home. The state's ecology is a kind of urban legend come true—the old alligator-flushed-down-the-toilet story repeated a thousand times with a thousand species.
Some find all this thrilling: Florida has become an open-air zoo, richer in species than ever before. To others, it's the harbinger of a new and depressingly undifferentiated age, when the old biological borders begin to fade and every place starts to look like every other. Ecologists have even given it a name: the Homogecene.
When Burmese pythons began to appear in the Everglades, in 1995, the state wildlife authorities didn't give them much thought. Snakes like these had turned up before. Burmese pythons were among the most popular exotics in pet stores at the time. They were cheap—twenty to thirty dollars a snake—easy to feed, and less temperamental than boas. The hatchlings looked harmless lying on a heat rock in a terrarium, and the store owners were happy not to correct that impression. "I remember thinking, Is everybody buying these things?" Reynolds says. "Well, apparently so. The craze was on. We were pulling twenty-foot pythons out from under little houses in Coconut Grove. Nobody cared. They didn't have a chance to breed that we knew about."
The escapees were usually caught in the suburbs or near the edges of the park, and were almost always full grown. Invariably, they'd come from a pet shop or a breeder, or been set free by an owner who found himself with more snake than he could handle. As Skip Snow, a wildlife biologist at Everglades National Park and its chief python hunter, later put it in a PowerPoint presentation, "Do you really want a snake that may grow more than twenty feet long, weigh two hundred pounds, urinate and defecate like a horse, live more than twenty-five years, and for whom you will have to provide mice, rats, and eventually rabbits?"
Still, the pythons found in the mid-nineties didn't fit the usual pattern. They ranged in size from juveniles to adults, and they were all caught deep in the park, in the saline glades to the southeast. Why would anyone drive that far just to dump some snakes?
Snow isn't sure how the pythons got to the Everglades. But he, for one, doesn't buy the Frisbee theory. Assuming the snakes survived the hurricane's blender effect, why didn't a few of them land closer to the reptile warehouse in Homestead? The mystery deepened when no more snakes were found for a while. Another pair showed up in 2000, and three more the following year. But there never seemed to be enough to prompt an official response. Snow was a "backcountry specialist" at the time, marking trails and scouting the wilder reaches of the park. He was concerned about the pythons, he says, but he had a hard time interesting others in them. "People kept saying, 'You haven't found a nest. You haven't seen very many.' There was a lot of denial, in my opinion." Burmese pythons had rarely been studied in their native habitat, and it wasn't clear that they could survive in the Everglades. "So people just made stuff up," Snow says. " 'The cold weather will kill them.' 'Fire ants will eat their eggs.' If they could find an excuse, they'd make an excuse."
The situation wasn't unique to the Everglades. After more than half a century of studying invasive species, biologists still can't tell which ones will die off and which ones will run rampant. Some, like the English house sparrows imported to New York City in the eighteen-fifties, start multiplying soon after they arrive. Others lie low for decades. "Reptiles have a tremendous amount of patience," Snow says. "They can wait out harsh environmental conditions. They can go without eating for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, there's a phase shift, a trigger point. The population starts to function as a population rather than as a lone inoculation." In a place as remote as the Everglades, he adds, that moment is almost impossible to predict. "When do you draw the line? When do you take action to avoid that logarithmic point where things take off exponentially?"
The decision, in the end, was made for him. One January morning in 2003, a group of tourists were walking along the Anhinga Trail, not far from the park's main entrance, when they noticed something splashing in the shallows nearby. When they went to take a closer look, they were witness to a death match. A full-grown alligator had clamped its teeth on an adult python and was ensnared in the snake's coils. The fight went on for more than twenty-four hours, with the alligator, by all accounts, getting the better of it. By the time it loosed its jaws and the mangled snake slithered away, thousands of pictures and hours of videotape had been taken, and accounts later appeared in outlets as disparate as the National Examiner ("GATOR VS. PYTHON!") and National Geographic. "The park superintendent called me after that," Snow recalls. "He said, 'We've got a problem.' "
Within months, Snow was finding pythons of all sizes in the park, including hatchlings—proof, if any more were needed, that the snakes were breeding. That summer, he took one of the hatchlings to a meeting of the state's wildlife managers. "Here it is 2003, and we've spent all these years waiting for the standard of guilt to be met," he says. "So I show up with this little python and pass it around." The others took one look at it, he says, and told him that he was out of luck—Burmese pythons were in Florida for good. "In one week, we'd gone from 'No problem at all' to 'You might as well give up.' "
Snow, who is fifty-seven, has the dour, keen-eyed look of a large waterbird—natural enemy of snakes. His face is thin and angular, its balding dome crowned by gray bristles. He has long legs, sloping shoulders, and a craning neck. When folded up behind the wheel of a car, as he often is, on his python-hunting trips, he can never seem to get comfortable, bobbling up and down and bending at the waist, squinching his eyes and jerking his head to the side. Yet he keeps his truck at a maddeningly slow pace, eyes fixed on the shoulders of the road.
"I won't pass up a snake," he told me as we were driving through the park one afternoon. "I may not be looking with every ounce of my body every minute. But there are search images that get developed: the feel, the look, the body posture, and head shape—all these things together." The day before, as we were leaving the park, Snow had suddenly swerved his truck around and doubled back down the road. He'd seen a black shape winding across the asphalt, he explained, but by the time he stepped out to catch it, it was gone. "Probably just a water moccasin," he said—poisonous, but only a fraction of a python's size.
Snow has spent his entire career with the park service. After earning a master's degree in environmental sciences from Miami University in Ohio, he took positions at Mt. Rainier and at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in North Dakota. The Dakotas were pristine and starkly beautiful: canyons of striated sandstone, patrolled by golden eagles and pronghorn antelope. In the spring, lightning would sometimes ignite the coal deposits underground, firing the clay above them into brick-red porcelainite. Snow and his wife, whom he'd met while still in high school in Cleveland, spent eight winters in the park and had a boy and a girl. But the cold and isolation could be hard to bear. The closest big city was Bismarck, three hours away; the closest thing to a social life shooting hoops with the two other park-service employees in the district. In 1988, Snow applied for a post in the Everglades, hoping to find a warmer, more stimulating habitat for his family. Chasing giant snakes wasn't really what he had in mind.
He lives in Miami now and commutes to the Daniel Beard Center, in Everglades National Park. The research center sits in what's known as the Hole-in-the-Donut, an area at the heart of the park that was long ago cleared for farming and the military. From Snow's office, in what was once an Army barracks, he can see a pair of low bunkers built to house Nike missiles after the Cuban missile crisis. But the Burmese python has come to seem a far more immediate threat. Snow and his colleagues have found more than nine hundred so far—three hundred and eleven in the past year alone. At best, he estimates, they represent ten to fifteen per cent of the total population; at worst, fewer than one per cent. The Everglades, at full capacity, could hold as many as a hundred and forty thousand pythons.
"There was that movie 'Gremlins,' " he said as we were driving. "They had these cute little things that, if they got out, they got out of control. Well, some wildlife is like that. These things get huge."
In the summer, pythons come out at night to hunt. In the winter, they emerge during the day, to bask in the brief sun. It was December now. The light was fading early, and the marsh was already alive with creaking and buzzing, flapping and cawing. On either side of the road, stands of slash pine sent shadows across the road, spindly as flamingo legs. In the distance, a string of low, bushy islands hung between marsh and sky—faint pulses on the horizon's flat line. The Everglades are a river of grass more than fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long—a landscape so innocent of topography that its mountains are measured in inches and even the largest predators try to keep a low profile. Burmese pythons are semi-aquatic: they're happy to hunt or swim in salt water or sweet, but they have to sleep and lay their eggs on dry ground. In the Everglades, they prowl from island to island, nesting in sandy soil or crawling onto patches of cattails. "They don't need much—any little island will do," Snow said. A snake may stay there for a few days, brooding or digesting in some comfortable hole, well sheltered from the wind, then head into the marsh again for another meal.
Snow has learned these habits largely through radio tracking. In the past three years, he has implanted twenty-five pythons with Tootsie Roll-shaped transmitters and tracked their movements across the marsh. His equipment can be accurate to within a couple of inches, and he has followed the snakes by airboat, motorboat, helicopter, canoe, truck, and on foot. Yet they still slip from his grasp. More than once, he has stood knee-deep in the muck, a beeping radio tracker in hand, convinced that a snake is at his feet. But he can't see it. Its movements are too silky, its olive-brown skin too well steeped in the murky water. "You know that the snake is right there," he said. "It makes no sound, doesn't rustle. Then all of a sudden it's over there."
To go any great distance, an animal usually has to cross a road. When it crosses a road, it runs the risk of getting spotted or squished. (Some biologists call this the "rapid-acceleration removal method.") Snow's best strategy, therefore, is to wait for the snakes to come to him. An enterprising python may travel more than a mile in a day, his tracking has shown, so sightings are not uncommon. Earlier that day, he had found a dead juvenile along the main park road, its skin ground into the gravel and shredded by a tire. The week before, he and another park employee had caught a live fourteen-footer. They'd grabbed it by its tail and yanked it onto the asphalt, pinned its head with a snake stick—a metal pole with a retractable noose at its tip—and wrestled it into an ice chest, for later dissection.
Pythons aren't venomous, but their upper jaws are fitted with a quadruple row of sharp, inward-curving teeth, their lower jaws with a double row. They use the teeth to gain purchase on their prey until they can coil their body around it. Snow's advice is simple: "Stay away from the pointy end." Even a small snake can cause a sizable wound and squeeze your arm hard enough to cut off the blood flow. The large ones have been known to swallow leopards whole. "It's just an absolutely absurd animal to have to deal with," he said. "The fact that they're even here. The fact that we even have to have this conversation. It's just off-the-charts crazy."
Scientists who study invasive species tend not to talk like scientists. They talk like detectives on a homicide squad, or generals in a Japanese monster movie. They count deaths, predict extinctions, warn of alien takeovers. They're used to being ignored.
Since 1900, the federal government has kept lists of injurious species that are forbidden from entering the country. They include disease carriers like Indian wild dogs and flying foxes, well-known invasives such as zebra mussels and brown tree snakes, and noxious weeds such as devil's thorn, goat's-rue, and giant hogweed. But adding a species to the list can take as long as a decade—the Fish and Wildlife Service has a single person assigned to the task—and enforcement is a constant struggle.
Every year, more than a third of a billion exotic plants enter the Port of Miami, along with its twelve thousand shipments of exotic wildlife. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service can afford to inspect only one in ten to twenty shipments—the ones that seem most suspect. "Even if we think we're catching a lot of people, it's probably only twenty-five per cent," Eddie McKissick, the service's lead agent at the port, told me. "It's like anything else—you catch them, they change their ways." Profits from international wildlife smuggling, the Department of Justice has estimated, are second only to those from drug smuggling.
McKissick is fifty-one and still enjoys the chase. He drives a black Crown Victoria Interceptor ("This sucker will scat!"), keeps his hair close-cropped and his mustache trim, and reads game-warden memoirs in his spare time: "A Sword for Mother Nature," "The Thin Green Line." When his cell phone rings, it sounds like a cavalry charge: Baba ba baba baaaa!
After sixteen years at the port, McKissick has seen or heard of every sort of smuggler's trick: boxes with false bottoms, bags with hidden compartments, boots made from endangered species and re-covered in common leather. One man was caught with a boa constrictor wrapped around his belly; another had a pair of pygmy marmosets in his fanny pack; yet another tried to sneak in some live finches—he'd crammed the birds into pill bottles and strapped them around his legs. The bond room below McKissick's office is piled to the ceiling with confiscated corpses: stuffed cobras, dried sea horses, monkey skulls, a rhinoceros head. But live exotics still fetch the best price. A few years ago, inspectors caught a smuggler with a suitcase full of giant bird-eating tarantulas and other exotics from Venezuela. The man had bought the lot for three hundred and fifty dollars, but he could have sold them in the United States for forty-five thousand.
By now, so many exotics have made it to Florida and borne young that local breeders may soon export as many animals as are brought in. When McKissick and I arrived at the port one Monday morning, a shipment of reptiles was headed for South Korea. They were packed in Styrofoam boxes and piled on a pallet in an Air Canada loading bay. McKissick watched as two of his staff, wearing gloves and safety glasses, sliced open the boxes with a razor. When the lids came off, hundreds of hatchlings blinked up at the light. They were crouched in round containers perforated with breathing holes, stacked on top of one another in a reptilian high-rise: snapping turtles with fierce little eyes, flying geckos with suction-cup feet, black-throated monitors flexing their slender, articulate claws. One two-litre soda bottle was filled with bright-green tree frogs, careening off the sides like popcorn at a movie theatre. It was an ecosystem in miniature.
Compared with most, this was a model shipment. "The crates that come in from the Third World—you can literally tear them apart with your hands," one of the inspectors told me. Many of the animals die in transit, she added, and some of the rest get free in the boxes and are desperate for release. The week before, a shipment had come in from Asia with more than seven hundred animals, including taipans, death adders, and eight other species of venomous snakes. Taipans are among the world's deadliest reptiles—their bite can be fifty times more toxic than a rattlesnake's—yet they've never made it onto the government's injurious list. With the right permit, an importer in Florida can sell as many as he likes. None are known to have escaped into the wild so far, but there have been numerous reports of cobras on the loose, as well as anacondas.
McKissick admits to being fond of some exotics—he likes to throw a little fruit to the green iguanas that hang out in his back yard. As for troublemakers like the python, he said, there's no good way to keep them out of the country. The best you can do is try to exterminate them when they escape. It was an odd admission for someone in his position, but I'd heard similar sentiments from a number of biologists. "It's time to stop studying these things," one of them told me, "and time to start killing them."
Late one afternoon, in a large enclosure behind the research center in the Everglades, Skip Snow and I watched a python go hunting. The snake had been caught a few weeks earlier, on the Tamiami Trail, to the northeast, and implanted with a radio transmitter—the first of three snakes that Snow hoped to track and study more closely in the enclosure. She was a magnificent animal: thirteen feet long and more than seventy pounds. As she moved across the open ground, her body morphed and flowed like melted wax, pooling into thick coils, then thinning into a narrow strand, sinking into the dun-colored grass, then suddenly floating above it, tasting the air with her flickering tongue.
Pythons are carnivorous, but they aren't picky. Snow and others have found mice, rats, rabbits, muskrats, raccoons, squirrels, bobcats, opossums, otters, deer, ducks, coots, grebes, egrets, and a house cat named Frances in the stomachs of snakes. "I don't think there is anything they can't eat or attempt to eat," he told me. The smaller prey go down in one gulp; the larger ones get a bite and a patient squeeze. But some meals are more obliging than others. Pythons often have teeth torn loose during a struggle and end up ingesting them, and they have trouble swallowing pointy objects: porcupines, for instance, or racks of antlers. One python in the Everglades was found with a great blue heron stuck in its throat. The bird's bill had poked its way through the back of the snake's head, and was widening the hole every time the snake tried to swallow it. When the python was on the verge of getting caught, it disgorged the bird and slithered off—presumably to hunt another day.
"You never bet against a snake," Snow said. "But they do make mistakes." Four years ago, a thirteen-foot python managed to swallow a six-foot alligator. By the time Snow found them, after a helicopter pilot had spotted them at Shark River Slough in the eastern Everglades, the snake was suffering from extreme indigestion. Its belly had burst open and the alligator's hind legs were protruding out of it like a pair of vestigial limbs. Some biologists speculated that the victim woke up inside the snake and tried to kick itself free, or clawed through in its death throes. Snow thought the python's appetite was just too large for its stomach. "That snake made a mistake," he said.
The question of diet had been much on Snow's mind lately. He and his colleagues had caught pythons on bridges and on boardwalks, along roadways and along the edges of canals. They'd found one snake inside a tourist's Ford Explorer, so tightly coiled inside a wheel well that they tried to shock it loose with a Taser. ("This tactic proved unsuccessful," the park ranger's report later noted, "as the python began to contract and excrete body fluids all over the four responders.") But they'd caught only a handful of pythons in the swamp, and they'd never managed to trap one. To lure a snake, he says, you have to have something it really wants. How can you catch an animal that eats everything?
Snow's latest answer lay along the fence, not far from the python we were watching. It was a rectangular wire trap, with openings at either end. It was positioned to intercept snakes that were following the fence line. To enter it, they would have to crawl down a funnel-like passage and squeeze past a hinged flap. But Snow had doubts about the design. The pythons in the park had shown no interest in it so far—the traps we'd checked earlier that day, near an abandoned lodge in the marsh, were all empty. Why bother crawling through a trap when you could just go around it?
Various state and federal agencies were working on more promising alternatives: traps baited with snake pheromones, thermal cameras that could track a python's body heat, "Judas snakes" radio-tagged to lead hunters to nests. A beagle named Python Pete had even been trained to track snake skins around the research center, with mixed results. ("He still needs to go to finishing school," Snow said.) But the new schemes all required more research and funding, and invasive animals are still a low priority in Florida. The state budget for controlling invasive plants, which threaten Florida's boating and farming industries, is nearly forty million dollars a year. The budget for invasive animals is less than a million.
Inside the preserve, the python had reached the trap and was nudging it with her nose. Instead of crawling inside, though, she slid over to the fence. She found the gap between it and the outside of the trap, wriggled her head into it, and pulsed her body forward, like a drawstring slipping through a hem. Then she lay there, comfortably cradled, and basked in the day's last light, as if she had all the time in the world.
Burmese pythons have been found as far north as Jacksonville and as far west as Tallahassee. Those snakes were no doubt escapees, but it's clear that the wild python population is spreading. The only question is how far. Animals pay no regard to political borders, biologists like to point out, and Burmese pythons are better travelled than most. Their native range stretches from the foothills of the Himalayas to the jungles of Indonesia, with everything from prairies to pine forests in between. And although they're cold-blooded, they're expert at regulating their body temperature. In the summer, they can climb a shady tree or cool off in a lake (their tails are prehensile, their lungs strong enough to sustain them underwater for half an hour or longer). In the winter, they can coil up in a riverbank or a hollow tree and brumate—the reptilian version of hibernating.
Two years ago, Gordon Rodda, a zoologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, decided to map the python's potential range in the United States. Together with two colleagues, he gathered temperature and rainfall data from weather stations throughout the python's native range, then compared them with similar data from the United States. The results were unsettling. "We had the same feeling that other people have, that this is a tropical animal," Rodda told me. "But once we actually looked at the weather records we were like, 'Huh. They aren't as tropical as we thought.' " Roughly a third of the contiguous United States lies within the python's range, they concluded, including all the Southern states and large portions of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. By 2100, at the current rate of global warming, the pythons could reach New York City.
Rodda's scenario is in some dispute. Last August, a team of biologists from the City University of New York, using a different habitat model, predicted that the snakes would stay safely contained in southern Florida. Still, Snow expects the worst. "I see no reason why all of Florida can't be occupied," he told me one morning as he was getting ready to dissect a python in his lab. "And they should be able to make a go of it in the southern tier of the U.S." Pythons can travel long distances, he said, and cross large bodies of open water. "They're very good swimmers. It's nothing to think of an animal going five or six miles or more." A python that finds itself in an unpleasant spot can always slither on.
The snake that Snow was dissecting had been caught in Summerland Key, one of the southernmost of the Florida Keys. To get there, it could have crawled down Highway 1, crossing several bridges along the way, or swum from key to key. Or it might have escaped or been set free by a local resident. The islands were a bad place for pythons to be. They were home to a number of endangered species well suited to the snake's appetites: Key Largo cotton mice, Lower Keys marsh rabbits, and others. (Florida as a whole has thirty-one threatened or endangered species that are vulnerable to pythons, and another forty-one that are listed as rare.) Several snakes have been caught on the islands with wild animals in their bellies, and python hatchlings have been found on the mainland, just north of Key Largo.
Snow unspooled the snake onto the floor and measured it: eleven feet two inches. Then he lifted it onto the counter, stuck a scalpel in it, and unzipped it like a ski bag. "If the smell starts to bother you, we can open the back door," he said. "I'm kind of numb to it." He checked the body for giant-toad ticks—another exotic species, carried in on cane toads from the Caribbean—and peeled back its tapestry skin. As he worked, he hummed a tune under his breath: "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."
In the fall, pythons usually fatten themselves up for the winter, Snow said, but this snake had been badly injured, probably by a car. Its tail was lacerated, some of its ribs were broken, and it weighed only twenty-two pounds. He pointed to its pale-pink flesh, its moss-green gallbladder. "I'm seeing virtually no abdominal fat," he said. "This thing was running on empty."
You can learn a lot about an animal from its gut—that Burmese pythons don't much care for fish, for instance. But Snow's purpose, in this case, was mostly political. If he could prove that the pythons were eating endangered species, it would be much easier to lobby for funds. So far, he'd pulled a few Key Largo wood rats out of snakes, but he could use more charismatic victims. "Not all wildlife is created equal," he said, extracting a brown wad of what looked like rodent fur from the snake's intestine. "We did get a wood stork once. And a Florida panther would be right up there—almost as good as a human. But nothing would be as good as the lap dog of a county commissioner."
The biologists I spoke to seemed a little surprised at the lack of human fatalities thus far. "If a thirteen-footer can consume a six-foot alligator, it's only a matter of time," Kenneth Krysko, at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told me. "Come on! Kids aren't six feet tall." A child in a secluded park, or along a canal, would be easiest to snatch. But Snow can imagine other scenarios. More and more pythons are being found around rural homes, he said—"The typical story is 'Yeah, you know, my chickens have been missing for weeks' "—and elsewhere they've been known to throttle the occasional pet owner. Pythons seem to have a tremendous homing instinct, he added. Six of the snakes that he has radio-tracked have crawled straight back to the places where they were caught—a journey, in one case, of more than forty-eight miles. "It puts an interesting twist on things," he said. "If you're an owner and let a python loose, what are the odds that it will show up at your back door?"
Floridians have some experience with man-eating beasts. Nearly a million and a half native alligators still roam the state—five times as many as thirty years ago, when they were declared endangered—and fatal attacks have tripled in the past decade. (Imagine a million and a half wolves stalking the forests of Wisconsin, a million and a half mountain lions roaming Colorado.) The state's "nuisance alligator" hot line—1-866-FWC-GATOR—gets more than sixteen thousand calls a year, and tales of close scrapes and pet abductions are a staple of the local news: the cocker spaniel snapped up while cavorting beside a pond, the jogger dragged off a canal embankment, the local pastor yanked underwater while out for a swim. "Most of the time, gators won't attack," Allan Woodward, a biologist with Florida Fish and Wildlife, assured me. "It's just that, every once in a while, they decide to think of humans as prey and give it a try."
The Burmese python can seem, under the circumstances, like just another local attraction. Americans are schizophrenic when it comes to invasives, Snow says. Every year, we spend well over a hundred billion dollars combatting them—about a quarter of our gross national agricultural product is lost to foreign pests and weeds—and tens of billions importing and selling exotic plants and pets. Florida alone averages one new agricultural pest a month. "We are in a situation now where everything that is imported is largely considered innocent until proven guilty," Snow said. "But the standard of guilt is too high." Even if the state can scrape together the money and the know-how for a python-eradication campaign, he said, it may not succeed. A single female python could lay up to a hundred eggs in a clutch, repopulating the state in a matter of years.
Since 1993, a coalition of scientists and environmentalists has urged the federal government to ramp up its efforts against invasives. ("I've dragged snake skins through the halls of Congress," Snow says.) The campaign culminated, last spring, in the proposal of the Nonnative Wildlife Invasion Prevention Act. The act would turn exotic-import laws inside out. Instead of a blacklist of banned species, it would give agents like Eddie McKissick a white list of approved species, screened by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Any animal not on the list couldn't enter the country. The bill was introduced to Congress by Madeleine Bordallo, a representative from Guam, where brown tree snakes have eaten all but a few of the native songbirds, and was modelled on similar measures in Australia and New Zealand. If it passes, it should reduce exotic imports, simplify inspections, and help prevent future invasions.
But it won't pass. The pet trade is worth more than forty billion dollars a year in the United States and nearly a hundred million Americans own exotics. (When I mentioned the white list idea to Eddie McKissick, he burst out laughing.) In 1976, the industry blocked a similar measure using the same arguments it uses now. The act would be a "managerial nightmare," Marshall Meyers, the chief executive officer and general counsel of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, told a House subcommittee last June. More than ten thousand species would have to be screened, many of them barely known to science. If biologists still can't say whether pythons will stay in Florida or crawl to Brooklyn, how can they predict if any species will become invasive? "Simply on the grounds of Statistics 101, this is unworkable," Meyers said. "Absent a crystal ball, it is impossible to prove conclusively that no harm has ever nor will ever occur at any time, anywhere in the United States."
The one statistic that seems to hold true is the rule of ten, described by an English biologist in 1993: one in ten exotics escape into the wild; one in ten of those become established; one in ten established exotics become pests. The rest tend to stay in their cages or cling to their ecological niches. (Or, if we're very lucky, eat one another: Argentine fire ants, marching north from Alabama, have feasted on Japanese beetles, marching south.) Invasives can undoubtedly drive natives to extinction, as the brown tree snake has shown. But most of the time an ecosystem isn't a game of musical chairs. When a new species arrives, it rarely takes another's place. It just finds another spot to sit.
Paul Shafland, the director of Florida Fish and Wildlife's Non-Native Fish Laboratory, has been tracking local fish populations for more than three decades. Florida's waterways are home to more than thirty species of exotic freshwater fish, he told me, and their total biomass nearly tripled between 1980 and 2007. Yet the number of native fish hasn't changed in that period; nor have any natives gone extinct. In 1984, Shafland spearheaded the introduction of the South American butterfly peacock bass to Florida, arguing that it would both control invasive tilapia and make a superb sport fish. Florida anglers now spend nearly ten million dollars a year trying to catch it, giving a substantial boost to the local economy. "Nothing has been displaced," Shafland said. "We're just changing the carrying capacity."
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is more of a philosophical question than an ecological one. Shafland, like most fisheries biologists, is used to managing animals for the enjoyment of people. "I'm a consumptive-use conservationist, not a puristic preservationist," he says. Yet he, too, regrets the changes in Florida. Even a single invasive—the one in a thousand—can transform a landscape, turning a prairie into a forest, a bird sanctuary into a snake pit. And the rest can slowly change the way we see a place. A parrot in Miami is like a McDonald's in Kathmandu: a sign that you are everywhere and nowhere at once. I asked Shafland the same question I had asked every biologist I'd interviewed: Would you turn back the ecological clock if you could? Like the rest, he didn't hesitate: "If I had a button on my desk today, and it said that I could eliminate every exotic freshwater fish in Florida, I would push it instantly."
"We are engaged in a giant experiment that no one can control," Snow told me, on my last night in the Everglades. "We are throwing these things in with no idea, no thought, no design. The only thing that continues to save us—or, at least, to slow things down—is the rule of ten." Some exotics may not be able to survive the local winter, but anacondas would be "very comfortable" in the Everglades, Snow believes, and it's hard not to wonder what other rough beasts are slouching toward Florida. "Let's not let this happen again," he said. "I don't want it to happen again."
As I was driving back to the airport from the Gulf Coast, two days later, I stopped in a town called Cape Coral, just west of Fort Myers. Carved from more than a hundred square miles of mangroves and piney flatwoods, Cape Coral has grown into a Florida boomtown like any other: it looks as if it were built, badly, last week. Its streets are a labyrinth of subdevelopments and strip malls, interlaced with more than four hundred miles of canals. When it was developed in the late nineteen-fifties, by the Rosen brothers from Baltimore, they promised prospective buyers a "waterfront wonderland." But the canals haven't just given people access to the swamp. They've given the swamp access to people.
Among the creatures that have lurched into town in recent years is an African lizard called the Nile monitor. Like pythons, monitors were quite popular in the pet trade during the early nineties: Patrick Reynolds remembers seeing hundreds of hatchlings in the reptile warehouse in Homestead. And, like pythons, they are spectacular animals that make terrible pets. Up to seven feet long, with stout legs, tapered jaws, and skin that seems to be encrusted with semiprecious stones, Nile monitors are notoriously aggressive and ill-tempered. When cornered, a monitor will stand on its hind legs and hiss, inflating its body and lashing its tail like a bullwhip. In the words of one biologist, "No one realizes the ability this animal has to tear off your cat's head with one twist." In the wild, monitors hunt on land or in the water, climbing trees, digging up burrows, or simply chasing down their prey: an adult monitor can outrun a human, though it will usually attack only when cornered. One wildlife bulletin from the U.S. Geological Survey called the species "omnicarnivorous."
Cape Coral is forty miles from Big Cypress Swamp as the crow flies, and another twenty from the Everglades—a habitat very similar to the Upper Nile. The monitors could wreak havoc on the park's bird and turtle populations, but they seem in no great hurry to get there. The hunting is just fine where they are. Their population is now in the thousands, Todd Campbell, a biologist at the University of Tampa, told me, and growing alarmingly. Campbell has been trapping and radio-tracking the lizards for six years, with the city's help. "They're very aware, very intelligent," he said. "You look in their eyes and—I'm not being weird here—it's more like you're looking at a bird or a mammal than some dumb pea-brained snake." Monitors often hunt in packs, like modern-day velociraptors, smelling for prey with their extremely sensitive tongues. When Campbell dissects them, he finds whole clutches of turtle or bird eggs in their bellies, and large boluses of fur, often from local pets. "They will eat anything that will fit in their mouths," he said. "And if they can't fit it in they'll tear it limb from limb."
Before I left town, I visited a local schoolteacher named Robin Snyder, who'd had some run-ins with the lizards. Her house was on a cul-de-sac beside a canal, with vacant lots on either side where the lizards breed. "They're getting braver and braver," she told me. "We went on vacation last summer, and when we got back a monitor had taken over our porch. It would sit on our front patio like it was a dog." The lizards had eaten her neighbor's poodle, she added, and they liked to snack on the town's rare burrowing owls. "It's like they're having a little shrimp cocktail or something." Two years ago, Snyder was pruning a bush when a monitor took a chunk out of her hand. Another bit her Border collie on the face, nearly taking out its eye. "That dog isn't afraid of anything," she said. "But now I have to drag her outside. She smells their urine."
Snyder is an earthy brunette, fifty years old, with long, untamed hair. She grew up in the hills of Virginia and is used to having bears and bobcats around. But these things are different, she said. "They'll just come right on out in the middle of the day." The city's nuisance hunter had already trapped ten or twelve in the "lizard condominium" next to her house. And a local woman, nicknamed Annie Oakley, had shot fourteen from her window with a pellet gun. But there always seemed to be more. "People are actually eatin' 'em over at Pine Island," Snyder said. "A guy I went to school with said they're pretty good." She smirked. Her son was grown and her husband had taken a job back in Virginia, she said. "So now it's just me and the dog and the lizards." Behind her, in the deepening dusk, the waters of the canal had darkened from green to gray and the murmur of the swamp had begun to rise. "I'm homesick for the mountains," she said. ♦


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Crime charges in WA courts at 12-year low; recidivism holds
by Matt Rosenberg August 20th, 2013
Total cases filed by prosecutors in Washington state's criminal courts reached a new low in 2012 compared to the 11 years prior, but the rate at which charged individuals released to the community experience "recidivism" – or being criminally charged again within three years – has continued to hold steady since 2001. It's been about 50 percent for individuals with domestic violence or "DV" charges classified as current; and about 40 percent for those with older charges of DV or other crimes. The findings come in a new report from the government-funded Washington State Institute for Public Policy. The study explains that charges rather than convictions are used as a leading indicator of recidivism in the comparison groups because in instances of alleged domestic violence, victims often decide not to press the case even if the crime may very likely have occurred.
A related WSIPP report issued earlier this year which surveyed the current scientific literature reaffirmed there is no lowering of DV recidivism rates resulting from state's mandated emphasis on treating DV offenders through the so-called "Duluth model." That approach accents the causative roles of gender, and social and historical constructs. WSIPP did find research showing that other practices which cut recidivism in the general offender population may also help Washington DV offenders avoid new charges, but that focused in-state tests are needed to better document potential.
Criminal charges at 12-year low
The new report starts out by accenting that total misdemeanor and felony criminal cases filed in Washington local and county courts numbered just 181,985 in 2012 – less than the 2001 low of 187,222 within the 12-year period covered. Nearly four-fifths, or 78 percent of the criminal cases filed in 2012 were misdemeanors, the rest felonies. That divide has held steady since at least 2001.
The per capita rate of non-domestic violence criminal cases filed per 1,000 residents has dropped from just under 35 in 2001 to just under 30 in 2011 while the rate of domestic violence cases filed has held relatively steady over that time at between seven and eight per 1,000.
DV offenders charged more often; and at higher risk for violence
Compared to those actually convicted of non-domestic violence felonies or misdemeanors, current or prior domestic violence offenders in the 2008 cohort were charged with crimes more than twice as often. By a factor of four they were more likely to have earned a high risk classification for violence, according to the WSIPP report.
2001 to 2008 recidivism trends in WA
Charge-based recidivism rates have held relatively steady since 2001. A graph in the report (below, left) shows that from 2001 through 2008 steadily half of individuals with a current DV charge have had some sort of criminal charge filed against them again with three years, versus more than 40 percent for those with older charges of DV or other crimes. When subsequent convictions within three years of a charge are used as the recidivism measure, the rates tend to drop six to eight points based on 2008 data in the WSIPP study.
Domestic violence is defined as "acts or threats of physical harm, sexual assault, or stalking by one household or family member against another…" Because it takes three years to assess whether a released offender will be charged again with a criminal offense, for the purpose of calculating recidivism rates, there is a lag in the data. The most recent year for which the rates are reported in the WSIPP study is 2008, which includes charges filed through 2011 against offenders released in 2008.
"Duluth" treatments in WA ineffective
In a related study published in January of this year, WSIPP synthesized the literature of domestic violence or "DV" prevention and surveyed treatments used in other states. The institute reaffirmed earlier findings that Washington's "Duluth model" for treatment – which emphasizes the crime category is "a gender-specific behavior which is socially and historically constructed" – has no effect on recidivism.
Other approaches show promise
The January 2013 WSIPP study did identify several other approaches to treating domestic violence that in earlier targeted studies cut DV recidivism by an average of one-third but the methods. These included relationship counseling, "cognitive behavioral therapy," couples therapy and drug and alcohol treatment. Such approaches would have to be tested specifically in Washington State to assess impacts on DV recidivism, WSIPP cautioned.
Public Data Ferret is a news knowledge base program of the 501c3 public charity, Public Eye Northwest. Ferret In The News. Donate; subscribe (free)/volunteer.

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RELIGST 224: Classical Islamic Texts (RELIGST 324)
The course is based on readings in primary Arabic sources in the key fields of pre-modern Islamic scholarship. The list of readings and topics will depend on the interests of the students. In addition to focusing on the language, contents, and context of the texts covered, the course introduces genre-specific historical research methods. The reading selections may be derived from Qur¿anic interpretation (tafsir), the hadith literature, adab, biographical dictionaries, fiqh, ta'rikh, kalam, or Sufism. Reading knowledge of Arabic is required.
Last offered: Autumn 2014 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II | Repeatable for credit
RELIGST 227: The Qur'an (RELIGST 327)
Early history, themes, structure, chronology, and premodern interpretation. Relative chronology of passages.
Last offered: Autumn 2007 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 231: European Reformations (HISTORY 231G, HISTORY 331G, RELIGST 331)
Readings in and discussion of theological and social aspects of sixteenth century reformations: Luther, Radical Reform, Calvin, and Council of Trent, missionary expansion, religious conflict, creative and artistic expressions. Texts include primary sources and secondary scholarly essays and monographs.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors: Pitkin, B. (PI) ; Stokes, L. (PI)
2019-2020 Autumn
5 units |
UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI |
Class #
Section 01 |
Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit |
| Students enrolled: 2
09/23/2019 - 12/06/2019 Tue, Thu 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM at 200-217 with Pitkin, B. (PI); Stokes, L. (PI)
Instructors: Pitkin, B. (PI); Stokes, L. (PI)
Notes: Undergraduates must enroll at the 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students must enroll at the 300-level for 3-5 units.
RELIGST 239: Luther and the Reform of Western Christianity (RELIGST 339)
Luther's theology, ethics, biblical interpretation, and social reforms and their significance for the remaking of Western Christianity. Readings include Luther's own writings and secondary sources about Luther and his world.
Last offered: Autumn 2012 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 245: Religion, Reason, and Romanticism
The late 18th-century European cultural shift from rationalist to romantic modes of thought and sensibility. Debates about religion as catalysts for the new Zeitgeist. Readings include: the Jewish metaphysician, Mendelssohn; the dramatist, Lessing; the philosopher of language and history, Herder; the critical idealist, Kant; and the transcendental idealist, Fichte.
Last offered: Autumn 2007 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 246: Constructing Race and Religion in America (AFRICAAM 236, AMSTUD 246, CSRE 246, HISTORY 256G, HISTORY 356G, RELIGST 346)
This seminar focuses on the interrelationships between social constructions of race, and social interpretations of religion in America. How have assumptions about race shaped religious worldviews? How have religious beliefs shaped racial attitudes? How have ideas about religion and race contributed to notions of what it means to be "American"? We will look at primary and secondary sources, and at the historical development of ideas and practices over time.
Last offered: Winter 2018 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-ED, WAY-SI
RELIGST 250: Classics of Indian Buddhism
Texts in English translation includING discourses (sutras), philosophical treatises, commentaries, didactic epistles, hymns, biographies, and narratives.
Last offered: Spring 2008 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 251: Readings in Indian Buddhist Texts (RELIGST 351)
Introduction to Buddhist literature through reading original texts in Sanskrit. Prerequisite: Sanskrit. Undergraduates register for 251 for 5 units. Graduate students register for 351 for 3-5 units.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum | Repeatable for credit
Instructors: Harrison, P. (PI)
2019-2020 Spring
5 units |
UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum |
Class #
Section 01 |
Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit |
03/30/2020 - 06/03/2020 Mon 2:30 PM - 5:20 PM with Harrison, P. (PI)
Instructors: Harrison, P. (PI)
RELIGST 252: Hearts and Diamonds: The Lives of Buddhist Sacred Texts
An exploration of two key Mahayana Buddhist scriptures (the Heart & Diamond Sutras) and their histories, looking at what they say and how they have been used, from the first millennium to the present day.
Last offered: Autumn 2012 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
RELIGST 255: Religion and Power in the Making of Modern South Asia (HISTORY 297F, RELIGST 355)
This course examines the diverse ways that religious traditions have been involved in the brokering of power in South Asia from the late seventeenth century to the present day. We will examine the intersection of religion and power in different arenas, including historical memory, religious festivals, language politics, and violent actions. At the core of our inquiry is how religion is invoked in political contexts (and vice-versa), public displays of religiosity, and the complex dynamics of religion and the state. Among other issues, we will particularly engage with questions of religious identity, knowledge, and violence. Undergraduates must enroll in RELIGST 255 for 5 units. Graduate students must enroll RELIGST 355 for 3-5 units. HISTORY297F must be taken for 4-5 units.
Last offered: Spring 2016 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-ED, WAY-SI
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Ecuador will strengthen fiscal stability with IDB support
Wednesday, August 28, 2019 - 21:16
Ecuador will strengthen its fiscal stability framework by optimizing the ownership of public companies of the executive function with a loan of $75 million approved by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This reform program aims to recalibrate the country's growth engines, acting as a catalyst for private sector development and improving the competitiveness of the economy for all its citizens.
IDB and Agitos Foundation extend project to strengthen Para sport and social inclusion
Tuesday, August 27, 2019 - 10:34
New phase of 'En sus marcas, listos… inclusión" will benefit communities in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Dominican Republic. Paralympic sport is a key tool in the socioeconomic inclusion of people with disabilities. That's why the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Agitos Foundation have launched a new project during the Lima 2019 Parapan American Games which aims to continue the previous work with the 'En sus marcas, listos… Inclusión' initiative.
Study analyzes challenges faced by Central America as it seeks sustainable development
Friday, July 19, 2019 - 09:40
A new publication uses analysis of trade, investment, migration, the financial sector, raw materials, and natural resources to propose policy options The Inter-American Development Bank and the Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development (CLACDS) of INCAE Business School have presented in San Jose, Costa Rica, a book entitled "The Future of Central America: Challenges for Sustainable Development", w
IDB Annual Meeting Concludes with Institutional Strategy Update
Wednesday, July 17, 2019 - 17:54
• IDB estimates annual gap in development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean is US$650 billion. • Region's private sector, crisis in Venezuela and macroeconomic challenges among topics of discussion. GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador – The 60th Annual Meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and IDB Invest concluded today in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with the approval of an updated institutional strategy for 2020-2023 that is intended to increase resource mobilization.
El Salvador will strengthen fiscal sustainability with IDB support
Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - 16:53
A $200 million loan will provide budget support for priority government expenditures, thereby protecting public investment and social program funding to promote inclusive growth El Salvador will strengthen fiscal sustainability by securing resources for complementary financing of the General State Budget with a $200 million loan approved by the Executive Board Directors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
IDB launches innovative territorial approach to address development challenges
Thursday, May 9, 2019 - 14:38
A study entitled "Honduras: a territorial approach to development" presents for the first time a spatial economic strategy that redefines the traditional national model so as to achieve greater and more inclusive economic growth. As it marks its 60th anniversary, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has presented the study "Honduras: a territorial approach to development", which makes an innovative proposal to confront the country's development challenges and fu
IDB approves grant funds for countries receiving migrants in Latin America and Caribbean
Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - 13:22
Grant resources will support inclusive national development investments, regional projects, research, training on critical issues, and innovative solutions impacting development in region The Board of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank has approved the use of its special grant facility to support operations that help countries integrate migrants into local communities and contribute to their development.
IDB study estimates big GDP impacts from low infrastructure investments in Latin America
Monday, April 15, 2019 - 15:35
Growth in Latin American and Caribbean is sharply impacted by the failure to invest in infrastructure and the cost rises over time, according to a new report by the Inter-American Development Bank. The study looks at energy, transportation, telecommunications, and water and sanitation sectors in six countries indicative of the reality for the entire region: Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Peru.
Weaker global outlook trims Latin America and Caribbean growth prospects
Monday, April 15, 2019 - 12:49
Infrastructure investments seen as critical to help region overcome global headwinds A combination of economic shocks could lower growth in Latin America and the Caribbean by an annual average of up to 1.7 percent in 2019-2021 of GDP, according to the Inter-American Development Bank's Macroeconomic Report, bringing the baseline growth rate from 2.5 percent to just 0.8 percent.
IDB highlights strengths of Central America in the face of external economic challenges
Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - 15:14
Two new studies on the region examine the current economic landscape and the work that the IDB Group has carried out over the last year. The economy of Central America and the Dominican Republic has continued to grow over the past year, although at significantly different rates depending on the country. For 2018, growth is estimated at 3.8 percent, a level similar to that of 2017, thanks to a robust economic performance by the region´s main trading partner, the United States.


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Jon Radowski, the owner and chief pilot of Above & Beyond Ballooning, has been involved in ballooning essentially his entire life. His interest took off at the age of two when attending a balloon festival with his family. Jon knew from a very early age that he would become a balloon pilot as soon as he grew old enough. After the magic of his first flight, he began flight instruction at the minimum age of 14, designed and built his first hot air balloon at 17, earned his private pilot certificate later that year, and became a commercial pilot at 19 to begin ballooning as a full-time career. In addition to flying balloons, Jon is a balloon repairman, and also designs and builds hot air balloons. Check out Apex Balloons for a look at what's on the drawing board.
Jon now has more than 21 years of experience flying hot air balloons of all shapes and sizes. For years, he commanded one of the world's very tallest hot air balloons, the Space Shuttle Patriot. Towering at a height of nearly 190 feet and with a wingspan of 115 feet, the shuttle balloon is three times taller than most balloons and twice as wide! Jon has flown some of the largest passenger balloons in North America, corporate balloons, and numerous special shapes. In addition to balloons, Jon also flies hot air airships, blimps, gliders, airplanes, and powered paragliders, and he is also a skydiver. He has flown in over 22 different states as well as Canada, Mexico, Australia, Switzerland and India. He has a natural skill at flying balloons and takes considerable pride in his unblemished safety record, with thousands of happy passengers flown without a single injury. Jon is also a hot air balloon flight instructor and has trained a number of students through to their private and commercial hot air balloon pilot certificates.
Our crew members are dedicated friends who are similarly in love with the sport of ballooning. It takes one to three crew members to help the pilot set up the balloon, follow the balloon during flight, and help pack it away after the successful conclusion. Crewing for hot air balloons is a valuable and constructive learning experience, and many crew members continue on to become pilots. If you are interested in becoming a hot air balloon pilot, crewing will help prepare you with lots of varied knowledge and skills that will be beneficial in the course of your pilot training. If you are interested in joining our team, please contact us.
Above & Beyond Ballooning • 1-844-9-HOT-AIR •


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California Closets, serving Whitehall, Pennsylvania
With an intrinsic knowledge of what matters most to Whitehall residents, California Closets brings high-quality function and style to every one of our custom closets and storage systems installed in Pennsylvania
At California Closets, we believe that the home is a place for comfort and connection. All of our products are designed to bring beautiful and functional organization to your home so that you have more time to focus on what matters most. Whether you have just moved to the Whitehall area and you're looking to make your first home truly your own, or you're downsizing from the suburbs to more compact city living, we will work with you to create a system that matches your exact needs.View More On This Location
Process and Customer Service
The expert Whitehall team will guide you through every step of the California Closets process, from assessing your needs during a complimentary in-home consultation, choosing the materials and accessories that match your aesthetic, to the installation of your custom storage system into its designated space in your home.
Everything was easy and professional . I didn't have much vision for what I wanted and not only did my consultatn create plans I loved the install guys were amazing. After building a new house you see a lot of contractors. I wish those guys were more like the installers for California closets life would be a lot easier if they were.
The experience was fantastic. The consultant and installer were professional and extremely customer focused. Everything was completed to our satisfaction on time and in perfect condition. Would highly recommend them to anyone needing this type of service.


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In her vision of Private Lives, Emma Weinstein stacks nostalgia on top of nostalgia. Here, Noel Coward's 1930 comedy of romantic fisticuffs looks fondly back on a bygone era looking fondly back on a bygone era. And the audience is swept into Coward's effervescent masterpiece of theatrical make-believe without quite forgetting they're in a theater.
In the production playing at Smith College this weekend and next (smith.edu/smitharts, 413-585- 2787), patrons entering the theater are greeted by a bare stage, its cavernous depths stacked with flats from, well, bygone productions. Then the unmistakable soundtrack of Era Number One is heard: World War II popular songs and Winston Churchill announcing victory over Hitler. A group of actors gather onstage in joyful reunion. Turns out they performed Private Lives in this London theater in the carefree days before darkness descended on Europe. The sets and costumes are still there, so for old times' sake, they put it on again.
They wheel on set pieces that jigsaw together to form the adjoining terraces of a Riviera hotel, exchange their ration-era drabs for colorful attire from the costume rack, and dive into the misadventures of two couples whose newlywedded bliss is upended by the kind of inevitabilities that only farce can imagine. Briefly (deep breath), Elyot is married to Sybil and Amanda is married to Victor but Elyot and Amanda used to be married to each other and even though they broke up amid continuous brawling they still love each other and in Act Two it emerges that the continuous brawling is a big part of why they love each other.
When I dropped in on a rehearsal last week, Weinstein explained the thought behind her invented prologue: "I was thinking about how we use comedy to escape from the darkness. So I was looking at this frame of people coming out of extreme darkness—the war—and re-finding comedy in nostalgia for the past." Weinstein, a Smith junior, leads an all-student production team, including actors from Smith and UMass.
When they're not onstage, two of the performers maintain the theatrical convention by reciting the stage directions ("Elyot comes out. He is about 30, quite slim and pleasant-looking"). During scene changes, a piano stage right is dusted off to accompany songs by Coward and his witty contemporary Cole Porter.
Scene-changing music also features in the Royal National Theatre's revival of She Stoops to Conquer, another masterpiece of comedic engineering. It's the latest in the NT Live series of satellite-casts from the London stage to cinema screens worldwide, including the Amherst Cinema this Saturday (1 p.m., 413-253-2547, amherstcinema.org).
Oliver Goldsmith's classic 1773 comedy of mistaken identity, social pretensions and class snobbery is given a madcap staging that only occasionally goes too far over the top. The clockwork plot involves (quick breath) a young suitor who mistakes a manor house for a country inn, his blind date for the barmaid and her wealthy father for the innkeeper.
In this typically ornate production from the National, a troupe of rustic servants, who outnumber the leads (ah, the freedoms enjoyed by state-supported arts!) provides amusing musical interludes while the sets revolve, rise through the floor and descend from the flies (ah, etc.).
Contact Chris Rohmann at email@example.com.


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CHOOSE JOY Boho Wrap Bracelet
CHOOSE JOY Boho Wrap Bracelet
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* Original has Sold * This piece will be handmade to order just for you and may vary slightly from pictures shown. Shape and font will be the same. Wraps are made from sheet copper which is stamped, enameled, kiln-fired, and placed on hand-dyed silk. A "how to wrap" card is sent with order.
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Anyway, none of the changes announced so far are Moonkin specific, but there are some interesting changes that you may want to pay attention to.
When the next major content patch launches we will be introducing epic quality gems and updating the perks for each profession.This is interesting for a couple of reasons. I've long speculated that Blacksmithing will become the profession of choice because when Epic Gems are released there buff would go up while the buff of all other professions would would stay the same. Apparently, Blizzard realized this also and is buffing all of the professions except Blacksmithing. Don't expect the buffs to be huge, but an additional 8-10 spell power is nice.
The second thing I noticed about this change is that they are buffing the gathering professions as well has the crafting professions.
The benefits of the gathering professions are a bit situational for Caster DPS, but I really like the changes to Lifeblood. If you look back at some of my old comments on the ability you will see that I thought Herbalism got shafted. In it's current form Lifeblood is a week dot that didn't scale, and probably wouldn't save you from anything. Obviously I can't make any definite comments on it right now, but I think these changes are all moves in the right direction. The only other thing I would suggest is to make it a direct heal instead of a DoT.
- Lifeblood: Increased healing (Rank 6), Scales slightly with maximum health, & No longer affected by global cooldown
- Toughness (Rank 6) provides more Stamina
Master of Anatomy (Rank 6) provides more critical strike rating
Personally, I like all of these changes, but it throws some of my plans right out the window again. I had been planning to drop Herbalism at some point to pick up Jewelcrafting, because the prismatic gems were so awesome and lifeblood was so weak. Then they nerfed Jewelcrafting. Then I figured I would switch to Blacksmithing once the Epic gems were made available because lifeblood is so weak and I will get 8 more SP then I would with any other profession.
Now, it doesn't really seem to matter which profession you pick. I would get more DPS from a crafting profession and they would save me money on some items and enchants. However, I really like having an extra oh crap button on my bar, and if Lifebloom becomes decent it could be a powerful heal and a critical time. So, I'm back to square one. At this point I'll probably stick with Herbalism until I see a clear reason to switch.
Heirlooms & Squires:
These changes have to do with the Argent Tournament, and I have to say I find them very distressing. Up until this point I have almost completely ignored the Argent Tournament and have been quite happy to do so. I don't really care about reps and the rewards didn't really interest me. So, I was quite happy to allow everyone else mess around with it while I raided and leveled new toons. Now that Blizzard is adding attractive rewards I feel like I have to participate in an event that I was otherwise happy to ignore.
- One thing I can tell you is that chest piece heirlooms will be available in the next content patch. They will provide a 10% experience bonus that stacks with the shoulder bonus.
- An Upgraded Squire: As any good squire should, this upgraded squire now has a mount and can be called forth every eight hours for three minutes of duty. The upgrade cost is 150 Champion Seals and your squire will also offer one of three services: bank, mail, or vendor access.
When they first announced the new Heirloom items I assumed that they would be similar to the current set, but fill in some of the gaps. Now that we know there are new chest pieces and that they have a 10% experience buff that stacks with the shoulder buff, I have to pick it up. As you can tell, I like to have alts, but I also like to level them as quickly as possible. Having the extra 10% is not an option. Its a requirement.
I do hope that the chests aren't the only new Heirlooms. When I was looking at options for my Shaman, I realized that they are pretty limited. When leveling my shaman I've been using the caster items I already have, but it would be nice to have something that is designed a little better for a shaman.
The other big change I see is the Squire. Despite the child safety/labor concerns, I see this as a must have. Being able to access your bank, mail or vendors only once every 8 hours may not seem like a big deal to some, but I really want it. I currently lug around an entire Bear set on the off chance that my guild will need me. I could free up a lot of bag space by leaving it in the bank. Also, how many times have we bought something from the AH, or had something mailed from an alt but forgot to pick it up. A little bit of convenience goes a long way with me.
So, last night I made my way up to Icecrown and started doing dailies for the first time in months. Damn you Blizzard.


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Iran Hacks Energy Firms, U.S. Says
Oil-and-Gas, Power Companies' Control Systems Believed to Be Infiltrated; Fear of Sabotage Potential
WASHINGTON—Iranian-backed hackers have escalated a campaign of cyberassaults against U.S. corporations by launching infiltration and surveillance missions against the computer networks running energy companies, according to current and former U.S. officials.
In the latest operations, the Iranian hackers were able to gain access to control-system software that could allow them to manipulate oil or gas pipelines. They proceeded "far enough to worry people," one former official said....


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Finding the perfect gift for the truck driver on your list can be a simple task if you know what truck drivers want and need. When you are shopping for the truck driver on your list, keep in mind not only do they have to find where they are going, they have to entertain themselves when they arrive. Most truck drivers spend several nights per week and countless down hours in their truck.
The concept of the game is that you control the operations of an airport. Everything from landing, loading, service and departures fall under your responsabilities. The game starts easy, but it gets more complited as soon as you start running out of spaces and lanes to manage the heavy traffic. You can upgrade your facilities to overcome the limitations of motorola equipment you initial airport.
The gadget is equipped with an inbuilt camera of5 MP, that offers a picture resolution of 2592?1944 pixels. The camera is also featured with auto focus with LED flash, Geo-tagging, image stabilization and video recording. The gadget offers you Internet connectivity on both local and Internet, with GPRS , EDGE, Bluetooth - v2.1 with A2DP, WLAN - WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, and the USB port - micro USB v2.0. motorola defy deals are already announced by all the leading networks and will be confirmed soon. The best motorola defy contracts can be obtained through online mobile Phones shops at cheap with oodles of benefits. Hopefully, you will enjoy and love to get these benefits.
The top of the line Hitec Aurora 9 mototrbo is not supported at all. Neither is the new Spektrum DX18 2 way radio, though the Hobbico website could just be out of date.
Not only the mobile phone bags could protect our mobiles, the silicone cases and the crystal cases could also be used to protect your mobile phones. The silicone cases can have a lot of kinds and types that there will also be one suitable for you. The silicone cases motorola earpiece can have many patterns and colors. Some producers print the popular cartoons on them, such as Hello Kitty or Disney. Maybe that is why the silicone cases have been very popular among the girls. What's more, the silicone cases could be much cheaper than a mobile phone bag; it could only cost you 20 dollars or less.
This software is so life-like that when you first sit down you will be totally confused. Wouldn't you be if you sat in a real plane for the first time? Why do you think professional pilots are first introduced to the cockpit using a flight simulator? Because it's lifelike, cheaper than using real aircraft and it works.
All of these three phones are good android smartphone that a modern user would expect. Through the above simply introduce, we are not hard to find it will be a good choice that no matter chose which kind of mobile phones. We expect Android to take more and more rich system products, hope each manufacturer could take out excellent products. So ultimately benefit will be our consumers.


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For Tomorrow: William Gibson, 'Zero History' and The Present... The Interview
William Gibson's recent Zero History, rounds out a trilogy of novels that began in the wake of the 911 terror attacks, and spanned the decade. In a meditative encounter with PopMatters, Gibson shares his thoughts on Zero History, the Bigend Trilogy, and the enduring present.
"I've never believed that I'm particularly prescient", William Gibson says modestly in an interview with PopMatters, "It's more a matter of being observant, and betting on the things that are already here, but seem to have potential for the future". This might at first scan as disingenuousness. Particularly from the mind that perhaps first conceived of, then coined the terms 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace'. But it only seems that way.
There is a kind of piety to William Gibson, a piety of the secular kind. A cultural fixture since his 1984 debut, Neuromancer, Gibson has evolved in the popular imagination, an exclusionary principle to his own immense sociocultural impact. It was not that Neuromancer had set the tone for a generation of writers (which it has), inventing a new genre (the genre is called 'cyberpunk'), and constructed a new dynamic for interrogating the social dynamic when it links human to human by way of technology (check). The story of William Gibson happens long after his debut, long after the invention of 'cyberpunk' or his invention of the Victorian era equivalent 'steampunk', and is continuing to happen well into the 21st century.
In the handful of days prior to the release of his latest novel Zero History, the novel which also wraps the decade-long "Bigend Trilogy", Gibson agreed to share insights into his latest work and longtime themes in his novels. With the subject-matter of Zero History, and particularly the new technology it posits in its concluding chapters, the binaried dynamic of being prescient versus being observant appears like an armada on the horizon. Something immense is happening, a basal shift in human conditionality on the planet. We just haven't noticed yet, but Gibson has.
Zero History rounds out a project began by Gibson in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With the opening chapter in the trilogy, Pattern Recognition, Gibson threw his newest protagonist, coolhunter Cayce Pollard (pronounced 'Case', a doff of the hat to his Neuromancer protagonist Henry Dorsett Case), into a search for a viral video released and distributed through the internet. In 2007's Spook Country new protagonist Hollis Henry, retired lead singer for cult band The Curfew, finds herself on the streets of L.A. chasing down the emergent new artform of locative art. Meanwhile Milgrim, no last name, finds his unique talents at the disposal of an individual who may or may not be a functionary of the government intelligence apparatus. The two protagonists' storyarcs collide around a missing shipping container. And Milgrim becomes entwined in one or more of Bigend's networks.
The three protagonists find themselves having been deployed like chess pieces by European marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend, a shadowy, media-sexy figure who in Zero History once again finds a way to intricate both Milgrim and Hollis the dealings of in his media conglomerate Blue Ant. "Bigend is perhaps more a 'vector' than a 'victor'", Gibson offers, meditating on the closing of his most recent novel. In the closing chapter the character arcs Milgrim, Bigend and a slew of Blue Ant employees (the ones who remained personally loyal to Bigend during an ostensible coup) are tied off on route to Iceland. Events play out on a ground-effect vehicle, a technology long since deemed non-viable, somehow redeemed by Bigend's marketing genius. Bigend is exactly this kind of character -- his counterintuitive rationality serves as a platform for finding and exploiting the edge, the cool. But in some ways, Bigend's character arc mirrors the role the trilogy he lent his name to, has come to play over the course of the last decade.
Rather than, as he has done in the past, set his work in the tantalizingly-out-of-reach not-too-distant future, Gibson has made the radical decision to commit fully to the 21st century with the Bigend Trilogy. "Having written about the 21st century since about 1981", Gibson says in an earlier interview to promote Spook Country "then finding myself in the actual 21st century, is stranger and more complicated than anything I would have been allowed to come up with". This has had a profound effect on Gibson's cultural capital. In an earlier trilogy, the Bridge Trilogy of the '90s, Idoru stands out for having correctly predicted the kind of virtual world that is Second Life. But with the noughties trilogy, Gibson has really ramped up his cultural capital.
Within the space of a few short years, Gibson's Bigend Trilogy would have predicted YouTube (as the viral internet videos of Pattern Recognition have done) and geohacking (as iPhone apps have come to make the locative art of Spook Country available to popular culture). With Zero History, Gibson stands on the cusp of a new generation of cultural prefiguring. Remote-controlled flying 'toys' hardwired into iPhones extend the human nervous across a broader range of the urban landscape. 'Ugly shirts' render their wearers 'invisible' to facial recognition software by offering a hard-hack of the London surveillance camera network. Rattan cane baked in calcium proves to be a superior form of human skeleton. And a new kind of surveillance software, the Order Flow, which forms the core of the novel's closing chapters.
Again the question of being prescient versus being observant emerges. More than anything what Gibson is able to do (and more so with this trilogy than with earlier ones) is determine the vector of human evolution. In doing so, Gibson taps directly into an ages-old mythography, perhaps the very first of mythographies, the story of human coevolution with technology. It is the notion of 'materiality' which the author of The Artificial Ape and Bradford University anthropologist Timothy Taylor uses as shorthand to reference a deep and abiding connection between the human and the fabricated.
"The technology we put into the world has a reverb", Taylor says explaining his concept on science podcast Are We Alone?, "which we don't then remove, we adapt to it. So for example, we sit around in chairs, we get slack pelvic floor musculature, because we're designed to squat. But we don't get rid of the chairs, we develop obstetrics. We have bad eyesight… we solve the problem with glasses like mine, but you also get optics… whereas in a cultural context, you might actually be saying, 'Hey, we've got these people who are good opticians, and now they've built a microscope, and now they've worked out what cholera is.' So the payoffs are no longer predictable in straight cultural terms".
Taylor continues by suggesting the driving mechanism for human evolution to no longer be natural selection, a process that allows species to adapt perfectly to a defined biological environment, but materiality or material-cultural selection. It is not a case of humans getting smarter and then fabricating technology, rather it is a condition technology being indistinguishable from culture. Making technology is already the act of evolving human biological capacity. This is a phenomenon that Taylor connects with the philosophical concept of the practico-inert, original proposed by Existentialist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre. It is this same liberty-seeking, elevating view of technology that underpins the novels of the Bigend Trilogy and Zero History in particular.
Gibson is at his most quietly passionate when his characters approach the subject of material elements, of things in the world. For him, as with other futurist writers like William Burroughs and Phillip K. Dick, individuated objects are often at odds with the systems that birth them, or the systems that they themselves birth. Case in point, Mere (a contraction of Meredith) is at her most passionate when speaking about her own history as a fashion model.
The living conditions were horrendous. She would tour Europe awash in a sea of opulence. She would grace the covers of high-end glossy magazines and model the emerging trends, visually the definition of cool. Yet between the financial commitments she had made to her model agency, and the cost of accommodation, food and simply living in the cultural capitals of the world, she would often find herself penniless. Her joy would be to tour the cities she found herself in, but that would come to present a unique set of problems. Her shoes were never sufficient to the task of walking the cities she found herself in. Breaking out of modeling and into fashion design, allowed her an opportunity to envision the kinds of shoes she would have needed.
"The seasons, the bullshit, the stuff that wore out, fell apart, wasn't real", Gibson writes for Mere speaking in a deep confessional tone to Hollis Henry, "I'd been that girl, walking across Paris, to the next shoot, no money for Métro card and I'd imagined those shoes. And when you imagine something like that, you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit. And sometimes they can. For a season or two."
"I don't see Meredith as imagining a system", Gibson offers PopMatters, "She wants there to be better sneakers. I don't see her as having much of an ideology about that. In making the sneakers she imagines, perhaps the system will be altered, however slightly. She isn't making the shoes because she wants the world to be better, but because she wants better shoes". The cultural cross-cutting proves too seductive at this point, and I pose the question about the sociocultural role of the visionary in the unfolding century. I'm thinking specifically about the recent past. About the wonder-decade enjoyed by Steve Jobs at Apple.


text: Give the gift of cookie perfection with this collectible tin filled with 16 classic OREO® cookies hand-dipped in Belgian white, dark or milk chocolate. Some are drizzled with Belgian white chocolate, some are drizzled with Belgian dark chocolate, others are sprinkled with milk chocolate decorettes—all are amazingly scrumptious. Inside send a personalized message to make the gift sweetly complete. 16 Cookies.


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The Louisiana House of Representatives has given its final approval to a bill that would block unmarried and gay couples from becoming surrogate parents, reports The Times-Picayune. The final vote was 87-9. The bill now moves to Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal for signature.
The bill would set up surrogacy contract rules in the state as well as define who is eligible to enter into such contracts. The final version of Senate Bill 162 defines "intended parents" as "married persons," thus barring unmarried partners and same-sex couples from becoming parents through surrogacy.
Louisiana law currently states any surrogate contract in the state is "unenforceable" and absolutely null and void, which proponents of the bill says has led to problems surrounding the legal rights of surrogate mothers, their spouses and the intended parents.
Opponents to the bill include the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Louisiana Family Forum, who contend that surrogacy is "anti-life" because the process involves the creation of embryos that are never implanted. On the other side of the political spectrum, Kathleen Sloan of the National Organization for Women, or NOW, and Jennifer Lahl from the Center for Bioethics and Culture also came out against the bill, saying it "turns women into exploitable commodities through financial inducement."
The conference committee also rejected an amendment that would have voided the bill if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Essentially, that would have meant that no one would have become eligible for surrogate parenting if same-sex couples were suddenly eligible. Equality Louisiana opposed the legislation but thanked the conference committee for rejecting "legislative gay-bashing [and an] unnecessary and mean-spirited amendment."
So much for "what about the children" ...


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Onboarding process
New employees are integrated into Imerys by their businesses through an onboarding process that focuses on helping new employees confirm their decision to join Imerys.
Imerys believes that ensuring employees feel a part of the organization from the first day helps their morale, satisfaction and productivity.
Group Welcome Sessions
As part of the onboarding process, we offer regional Welcome Sessions for all new recruits to Imerys at regular intervals throughout the year. These Welcome Sessions give an overview of the Group's many functions and businesses. They also allow newcomers to get to know each other and start building their network, as well as to interact directly with many senior managers within Imerys.