Staff Blog
What We’ve Found: Deer cull, ancient extinction explained, Copenhagen de-clawed, Alaska sues over offshore resources, drug companies boosting prices and NE Pennsylvania teachers bribed school boards for jobs
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
A deer-culling expedition composed of USDA marksmen was preparing to run through Lower Merion for the next four nights to reduce the local deer population and prevent the transmission of Lyme disease. The deer carcasses will be donated to the local food bank.
The giant Irish deer -- the largest species of deer that ever lived, with antlers nearly eleven feet across -- went extinct about 10,000 years ago because of natural climate change that caused fewer plants to grow and starved the deer, scientists found.
Rather than hammer out a climate change agreement at the widely-anticipated Copenhagen conference in December, world leaders including President Obama agreed in Singapore over the weekend, they'll just come up with a less specific, non-legally binding pact that will have to be fully realized at a later international conference.
Alaskan governor Sean Parnell was suing the federal government to get polar bears off the list of threatened species, claiming that protections on the bears' habitat was preventing the state from developing lucrative offshore oil discoveries.
In anticipation of the impending healthcare bill, the pharmaceutical industry was raising the prices of drugs at the fastest rate in seventeen years: about 9 percent over the last year, which will add more than $10 billion to the nation's drug bill this year.
Teachers routinely paid thousands of dollars to obtain teaching jobs in the public schools of northeastern Pennsylvania, according to the results of an FBI probe that began in the spring. So far, six school board members have been indicted for accepting bribes from prospective teachers.
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