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A 9-year-old-girl's vacation to Yellowstone National Park took a frightening turn Monday when a bull bison charged and tossed her into the air, the National Park Service (NPS) confirmed Tuesday. The incident is a dramatic object lesson in the importance of giving park bison plenty of grazing room.
"Wildlife in Yellowstone National Park are wild. When an animal is near a trail, boardwalk, parking lot, or in a developed area, give it space," NPS advised.
Nine-year-old girl injured by bison: https://t.co/HEJIPlwICv pic.twitter.com/YXTrBEpQcP
— YellowstoneNPS (@YellowstoneNPS) July 23, 2019
The girl, from Odessa, Florida, was with a group of people in the Old Faithful Geyser area of the park who were standing more than 7 times closer to the bison than park officials recommend. The group eventually caused the bison to charge and toss the child. The injured girl was first treated by emergency medical workers at the Old Faithful Lodge and then taken to the Old Faithful Clinic for further treatment before being released.
A video of the incident, first shared on Twitter Monday, soon went viral. The original video drew more than four million views in the two days before it was deleted, The Washington Post reported.
"My brother and I were looking at the hot springs, and we saw a bunch of people running down the path to the bridge. We saw through the trees some people petting the bison, super close," 18-year-old Hailey Dayton, who filmed the incident, told NBC News. "Because it was agitated by all the people and noise, it just kind of attacked," she added. "After that, everyone was screaming. There were a bunch of kids crying."
The park service said a group of around 50 people had been standing five to 10 feet from the bison for at least 20 minutes before causing it to charge. The park recommends that visitors stand 25 yards from large animals like bison, elk, bighorn sheep, deer, moose and coyotes and at least 100 yards from bears and wolves.
The park said it was still investigating the incident and had not issued any citations.
Bison are responsible for more visitor injuries than any other Yellowstone animal, The Washington Post explained. They are both large and fast: Bulls can grow to be 2,000 pounds and six feet tall, and bison are able to run as fast as 30 miles per hour, three times human speed.
A spate of 33 bison injuries from 1983 to 1985 prompted park officials to launch a safety information campaign, handing out fliers at park entrances and placing warning signs at campgrounds and visitor centers. But some visitors still aren't getting the memo. A 2018 study found that 80 percent of the 25 people injured by Yellowstone bison between 2000 and 2015 "actively approached" the animals. Close to half of them approached in order to take photos, the study found. On average, they were standing around 11 feet from the animals before being injured.
"Every year, there are regrettable accidents caused by people getting too close to these massive animals," NPS said, as The Washington Post reported. "It's great to love the bison, but love them from a distance."
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Tuna auctions are a tourist spectacle in Tokyo. Outside the city's most famous fish market, long queues of visitors hoping for a glimpse of the action begin to form at 5 a.m. The attraction is so popular that last October the Tsukiji fish market, in operation since 1935, moved out from the city center to the district of Toyosu to cope with the crowds.
gmnicholas / E+ / Getty Images
Kristan Porter grew up in a fishing family in the fishing community of Cutler, Maine, where he says all roads lead to one career path: fishing. (Porter's father was the family's lone exception. He suffered from terrible seasickness, and so became a carpenter.) The 49-year-old, who has been working on boats since he was a kid and fishing on his own since 1991, says that the recent warming of Maine's cool coastal waters has yielded unprecedented lobster landings.
The climate crisis is getting costly. Some of the world's largest companies expect to take over one trillion in losses due to climate change. Insurers are increasingly jittery and the world's largest firm has warned that the cost of premiums may soon be unaffordable for most people. Historic flooding has wiped out farmers in the Midwest.
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano could be gearing up for an eruption after a pond of water was discovered inside its summit crater for the first time in recorded history, according to the AP.
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'We Should Be Retreating Already From the Coastline,' Scientist Suggests After Finding Warm Waters Below Greenland
Andrew Yang's assertion that people move away from the coast at the last Democratic debate is the completely rational and correct choice for NASA scientists in Greenland.
By Johnny Wood
The Ganges is a lifeline for the people of India, spiritually and economically. On its journey from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, it supports fishermen, farmers and an abundance of wildlife.
The river and its tributaries touch the lives of roughly 500 million people. But having flowed for millennia, today it is reaching its capacity for human and industrial waste, while simultaneously being drained for agriculture and municipal use.
Here are some of the challenges the river faces.
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Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests
By Jake Johnson
As a growing number of states move to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison, an audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group bragging about the industry's success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors.
Speaking during a conference in Washington, DC in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted "model legislation" that states across the nation have passed in recent months.
AFPM represents a number of major fossil fuel giants, including Chevron, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.
"We've seen a lot of success at the state level, particularly starting with Oklahoma in 2017," said Morgan, citing Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the motivation behind the aggressive lobbying effort. "We're up to nine states that have passed laws that are substantially close to the model policy that you have in your packet."
Big Oil is now using its political power to try and criminalize protests of oil & gas infrastructure.
— Friends of the Earth (@foe_us) August 19, 2019
"This legislation has potential to punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment."https://t.co/bmiHjONEhy
The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression.
"Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system," Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May.
As The Intercept's Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks "has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in ... Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota."
"The AFPM lobbyist also boasted that the template legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support," according to Fang. "In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the version of the bill there, which is being challenged by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Even in Illinois, Morgan noted, 'We almost got that across the finish line in a very Democratic-dominated legislature.' The bill did not pass as it got pushed aside over time constraints at the end of the legislative session."
Many of the state bills restricting the right to protest have been "drafted by companies and passed through groups like ALEC, the secretive group of corporate lobbyists trying to rewrite state laws to benefit corporations over people." @greenpeaceusa https://t.co/ZxpTjWdrwT
— Stand Up To ALEC (@StandUpToALEC) May 6, 2019
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
Wildfires raging on Gran Canaria, the second most populous of Spain's Canary Islands, have forced around 9,000 people to evacuate.