I was looking at Honeymoon Lake, from my deck, Friday and noticed something odd at the base of one of the alders.

I had seen some trees that had been felled by beaver around the lake but they all looked old. Nothing recent. This had happened during the night or early morning. To the right of these two alders is a small clump of around 10 small alders. Two of those had been chewed down.

Saturday they returned. Another couple of chewing sessions and the tree will be down.

No more tree chewing today. Maybe beavers take Sunday off too.

Back to the Real world

The Poster Police
A Durham student activist gets a visit from the Secret Service

Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at Brown's Duke Manor apartment. Opening the door, she found a casually dressed man, and a man and woman in what appeared to be business attire. Her first thought, she says, was, "Are these people going to sell me something?"

But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other man was an investigator from the Durham Police Department.

"Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material," the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have a look around?
[read more]

thanks to MetaFilter

Victorious warlords set to open the opium floodgates
In the small mud-brick village of Chinar Khalia, near the eastern city of Jalalabad, Ali and other local farmers are now looking forward to a bumper harvest around mid-April. The Taliban ban on poppy-growing, which slashed Afghan opium production by 94 per cent last year, is over. And the impact on the West will be huge - 90 per cent of Europe's heroin comes from opium grown in Afghanistan.

'The Taliban order on poppy-growing was false,' Ali said. 'It hurt many farmers that they could not grow poppies. Now I will earn money again.'
(...)

Now, with the Taliban ban on poppy- growing lifted, it would appear that Afghanistan is facing a return to those days. The main Nangrahar opium bazaar of Ghani Khel has reopened for business. Afghan opium traders arriving in the Pakistani city of Peshawar claim 100 of the market's 300 stalls now sell opium blocks stockpiled during the ban. The same is true of Kandahar, where the city's main opium bazaar escaped the US bombing.

'All our evidence is consistent. They are replanting in a major way,' said Bernard Frahi of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention located in Islamabad.

For Afghan farmers it is a simple choice. A farmer can earn £6,000 for a hectare of opium, compared to just £34 for wheat
[read more]