CHICAGO (Reuters) - Minnesota, the top U.S. turkey producing state, has found two more commercial turkey flocks to be infected with a lethal strain of avian flu, including one in a previously established quarantine zone, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Monday.
The state in the past month has found that H5N2 flu, which can kill nearly all the birds in a flock within 48 hours, has infected seven flocks, according to the USDA. In the last week alone, the number of birds to be culled in Minnesota because of the flu has topped 150,000.The infected flocks were in the state's biggest turkey-producing counties. Kandiyohi and Stearns counties were the top two turkey-producing countries in Minnesota in 2012, according to the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association.
Minnesota's turkey farmers raise about 46 million birds annually accounting for more than $600 million in income, according to association. Nationwide, farmers raised about 240 million turkeys in 2013, according to the USDA.
Ninety percent of the turkey products processed in state are exported out of Minnesota, and of that 90 percent, 15 percent are exported, the association said.
Recent bird flu infections in states stretching from Arkansas to California have prompted overseas buyers to limit imports of U.S. poultry from companies such as Tyson Foods Inc, Pilgrim's Pride Corp and Sanderson Farms Inc.
The latest U.S. infection was the third case detected in Stearns County, Minn., which is northwest of Minneapolis. The infected flock of 76,000 turkeys is already in a quarantine zone established because of a previous infection in the county, according to the USDA. The quarantine limits the movement of poultry in and out of the area around an infected flock.
Another new case of H5N2 flu was detected in a flock of 26,000 turkeys in Kandiyohi County, Minn., which is west of Minneapolis.
Both flocks will be culled to prevent the virus from spreading, and the birds will not enter the food supply, according to the USDA.
Officials believe the flu is likely being spread by waterfowl, but do not know precisely how the virus is making its way into commercial poultry operations. Molecular testing has shown the H5N2 virus is nearly identical to viruses isolated in migratory ducks, according to the USDA.
Wild birds can carry the disease without appearing sick, and the USDA has advised people to avoid contact with sick or dead poultry and wildlife.
So far, no human infections of the virus have been detected.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/minnesota-finds-two-more-turkey-flocks-infected-lethal-163519606--finance.html
Snowden To Oliver: ‘NSA Has The Greatest Surveillance Capabilities We’ve Ever Seen In History’
WASHINGTON (CBS DC) — HBO comedian John Oliver traveled to Russia and spoke with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last week in a wide-ranging interview that touched on the Patriot Act’s upcoming expiration date, his “vindication” in releasing the NSA documents – and even a comical take on government access to Americans’ naked selfies.
The primary focus of Oliver’s criticism is that the Patriot Act, specifically the controversial Section 215, is set to expire on June 1 unless the government reauthorizes the mass surveillance collection program. Looking to bring attention to the NSA’s intrusive technology, the comedian spent “48 paranoid hours in Moscow” to do a half-humorous, half-serious interview with the “the most famous hero and/or traitor in recent American history” who leaked a trove of documents about the U.S. government’s surveillance programs to journalists in 2013.
Asked by Oliver if he misses home, Snowden said “my country is something that travels with me. I do miss my country, I do miss my home, I do miss my family.”
RELATED: Snowden Leak: NSA Helped British Steal Cell Phone Codes
Snowden said that the U.S. was spying on anybody they could remotely link to terrorist activities, and in some cases, no connection whatsoever. Snowden said he felt it was his duty to let the American people decide if this is the government they want.
“The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities that we’ve ever seen in history,” said Snowden. “Now what they’ll argue is that they don’t use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens. In some ways that’s true, but the real problem is they’re using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them and then saying, ‘Well, I have a gun pointed at your head, I’m not going to pull the trigger. Trust me.’”
Snowden warned that while some NSA programs were helpful to the country’s intelligence officials, spying had started coming against American citizens themselves in wide-ranging domestic surveillance. Snowden says he understands that he leaked top-secret information, but he trusts the journalists it was given to and that he felt he needed to take the risk on behalf of Americans’ civil liberties being undermined by their own government.
“I’ve evaluated all the documents that are in the archive,” said Snowden. “I do understand what I turned over.”
Regarding the trove of documents Snowden leaked to journalists, he said he’s “not handling anything anymore, it’s been passed onto journalists” – a risk Snowden said he was willing to take.
“You will never be completely free from risk if you’re free. The only time you can be completely free from risk is when you’re in prison,” Snowden said of his decision to leak the documents. He added that he was “terrified” in the initials days after he leaked the documents and fled to Hong Kong and later granted asylum in Russia.
RELATED: Snowden: CIA Committed ‘Inexcusable Crimes’
“I was initially terrified that this was going to be a three-day story. Everybody was going to forget about it,” he told Oliver. “But when I saw that everybody in the world said, ‘Whoa, this is a problem, we have to do something about this,’ it felt like vindication.
“I think we’re seeing something amazing which is if you ask the American people to make tough decision to confront tough issues, to think about hard problems – they’ll actually surprise you… I did this to give the American people a chance to decide for themselves to decide the kind of government they want to have. That is a conversation the American people deserve to decide.”
Oliver showed Snowden video of random Americans being interviewed on the street in Times Square. Many of the people asked about Snowden had little idea who he was or what he’d actually done.
“You can’t expect everybody to be uniformly informed,” said Snowden, adding that the NSA surveillance is a “complicated conversation… It’s a real challenge to figure out. How do we communicate things that require sort of years and years of technical understanding, and compress that into seconds of speech, so I’m sympathetic to the problem.”
In a comical aside during the interview, Oliver asked Snowden to make the issue connect with Americans by bringing up whether or not the government is analyzing people’s “d*** pics.”
“If you have your email somewhere like Gmail, hosted on a server overseas or transferred overseas or [if it] at any time crosses outside the borders of the United States, your junk ends up in the database,” said Snowden. “Even if you send it to somebody within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go from New York to London and back and get caught up in the database.
“The good news is, there is no [government] program named ‘The D*** Pic Program,’” says Snowden. “The bad news is they are still collecting everybody’s information, including your d*** pics.”
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/04/06/snowden-to-oliver-nsa-has-the-greatest-surveillance-capabilities-weve-ever-seen-in-history/
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